S s

Salutem dicit. Latin for `sends
greetings.' For details, see the S.D. entry.

s-

Sec-. When long chemical names are abbreviated, the sec-
indicating a secondary carbon is often abbreviated to s-. I suppose you
can think of sec- itself as an abbreviation for secondary, but
if you want to be fussy you can say it's a symbol based on the word. Whatevah.
Cf.t-.

S

Senate. A bill proposed in the
US Senate is designated by S followed by a number, as for example ``S1043.''
A resolution of the Senate, which may concern internal matters
(e.g., parliamentary procedure) or sense-of-the-senate votes, is labelled
SRES. The bipartisan agreement on rules for the impeachment trial of
President Clinton, for example, passed unanimously on Jan. 8, 1999,
was SRES16 of the 106th Congress.

S

Sentence. The kind written, not served, is the one I've seen abbreviated
(in linguistics and grammatical literature).

Sierra. Not a geographical abbreviation here, just the
FCC-recommended ``phonetic alphabet.'' I.e.,
a set of words chosen to represent alphabetic characters by their initials.
You know, ``Alpha Bravo Charlie ... .'' The idea behind the choice is to have
words that the listener will be able to guess at or reconstruct accurately even
through noise (or narrow bandwidth, like a telephone).

The problem here is that the sierra doesn't have enough of what we linguists
refer to technically as ``oomph.'' Use ``Succotash'' instead.

Even on the best phones, ``ess'' sounds almost
indistinguishable from ``eff.'' Most people just use ``Sam'' and ``Frank''
to distinguish these. You can try ``Foxtrot'' and ``Sierra,'' but people
will just become confused, so if you're really not going to use
the standard Sam and Frank, then you get more mileage from the SBF
recommendations (Fandango and Succotash) than from the boring old FCC
recommendations.

s., s, (s)

Solid. In chemical formulae, the fact that a substance is in the solid
state may be indicated by a parenthesized ess
(always lower case) following the chemical formula. For example,
``C (s)'' appearing in a chemical equation represents solid carbon
(whether diamond, or graphite, or some other allotrope is not specified;
similarly unspecified is whether the solid is crystalline or microcrystalline
or what). Dry ice is CO2 (s); carbon dioxide gas is
CO2 (g).

A symbol related to (s) is the downward-pointing arrow. For reactions that
take place in a fluid solution, this indicates that a reaction product
``precipitates out.''

S

Sound.

S

South.

S.

Latin, Spurius. A praenomen, typically abbreviated when writing
the full tria nomina. Also ``Sp.'' I'd be willing to assert that the latter
abbreviation was less common, but what would that mean today?

Many volatile sulfur compounds stink, and hell is traditionally scented
with the stuff. Thomas Carlyle wrote of Napoleon III

His mind was a kind of extinct sulphur-pit.

(Historically, the predominant spellings in English have used ph. However,
today sulfur is the standard spelling in the US and nowhere else in the
English-speaking world. You've gotta love it: some patterns are consistent.)

Supersaturation. Solution beyond the concentration that produces a
second phase. E.g.: crystal growth takes place in solutions which are
supersaturated with material that would form a precipitating phase. It's
not just a concept, however: S is the symbol for the ratio of
solute concentration to the saturated concentration (i.e., to the
solute concentration that would be in thermodynamic equilibrium with
precipitate).

You're not stupid (and even if you are, you prefer to be flattered that
you're not) so I don't have to tell you that when S > 1, a
solution is supersaturated, and now that I have, you feel condescended to.
It's an occupational hazard of glossary compilers.

For a supersaturated vapor, S is the ratio of the gas (i.e., the
pressure of the vapor) to the vapor pressure of the liquid phase (at the
same temperature). At 0 °C, and atmospheric pressure, one can achieve
supersaturations as high as 5 (i.e., relative humidity of 500%) in
clean air. [Dirt of any sort nucleates.] Cool it further (increase S
by decreasing equilibrium vapor pressure) and homogeneous nucleation takes
place (fog).

The domain code for Saudi Arabia, as well as the
ISO country code generally (SA), is often
mistaken for that of South Africa. South Africa's
ccTLD is <.za>.

S.A.

Savings Association.

SA

Scientific Atlanta. A company. Their name is on a bunch of satellite
dish TV receivers. They also make cable converter box innards.

SA

Self-Activating. Term characterizing certain donor-acceptor complexes.
Terminology dates back to as late as the fifties, when acceptors were called
`activators' and donors were called `co-activators.' This usage arose from
studies of electroluminescent (EL) materials --
phosphorus, and II-VI materials that were studied
as possible replacements for phosphorus in CRT's.
When electroluminescent materials were first studied, it was understood
empirically that very pure bulk materials would not electroluminesce before
the reason (need for doping) was understood. The impurities that would
activate the electroluminescence of phosphorus were thus called `activators.'

s.a.

German siehe auch -- `see also.'

SA

Sino-Atrial (node). A group of fast-cycling Purkinje cells near the
sinus venosus.

South Asia. This term is conventionally applied to the Indian
subcontinent, rather than all of southern Asia (Indochina is at the latitudes
of India and the longitudes of China). As I'm
sure you recall, the sea floor beneath the Indian Ocean exhibits some of the
fastest geological drift on earth -- over 10 cm/y.
The Indian subcontinent is on a tectonic plate that is thrusting into the soft
underbelly of the main Asian land mass, uplifting the Himalayan mountains in
the process. I apologize. I really didn't want to use language like ``soft
underbelly,'' but I-- I simply couldn't help myself.

Hello, my name is Al and I am-- I am a logophile. I confess
that I am powerless against the overwhelming force of words. The terrible
state that my life has reached can be explained completely by words, and yet,
so abjectly addicted am I that I still cannot bring myself to renounce words
(in so many words), and I continue to resist total abstinence from words. (You
may have noticed this yourself.) Finally, let me say that words cannot express
my gratitude for the words of support you have given me here today, and for the
stories you have shared.

Let's face it, this is ridiculous. The initial A has been enormously over-used
in naming continents: Africa, Asia, Australia, North and South America, and
Antarctica. (The rare term Southern Antarctica is roughly equivalent to
the more common Central Antarctica. The Republic of North Antarctica has a
website, but no ccTLD yet.)

SA

South Australia. The name of a state in the federation (but not republic,
after all) that is officially The Commonwealth of Australia. Adelaide
is the state capital. Considering that Australia already means southern
land, this name is effectively southern southern land. I find that amusing,
but then I am easily amused.

SA, S/A

Space Available [passenger]. A kind of ticket (and passenger) also called
standby.

SA

Sputter-Anneal.

SA

Structural Analysis. I've seen the abbreviation in linguistics
literature, at least.

German, Sturmabteilung. Literally `storm division.'
Members were known as `storm troopers.' The term originated in WWI, to describe small commando units using
infiltration tactics, first employed on a large scale by the German general
Oskar von Hutier.

The term became well-known in English after the Nazis used it as the name for
their paramilitary
organization. (It started out as a group of bodyguards for Nazi leaders,
and evolved into a uniformed group of street hooligans tasked with intimidating
the party's political enemies. Over time, the leadership security tasks were
taken over by the SS. After the Nazi party
came to power, the socialist-leaning SA worried Hitler's supporters among
nationalist businessmen, and posed the threat of a coup. Evidence of a coup
plot was manufactured by Himmler and Heydrich for Hitler's edification, just as
the SS was being reengineered into a secret police. The SA was decapitated on
the Night of
the Long Knives (Saturday night to Sunday morning, June 30-July 1, 1934),
during which the SS murdered probably a few hundred targets (SA leaders and
socialist-leaning members, and scattered conservative potential problems).

Sub-Aqua Association. A multinational
organization (brings together member organizations from Scotland and England,
at least).

SAA

Syria Accountability
Act of 2003. An act of the US Congress to ``halt Syrian support
for terrorism, end its occupation of Lebanon, stop its development of Weapons
of Mass Destruction, cease its illegal importation of Iraqi oil and illegal
shipments of weapons and other military items to Iraq, and by so doing hold
Syria accountable for the serious international security problems it has caused
in the Middle East, and for other purposes.''
According to its section 1, the short title of the act is ``Syria
Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003.''

The act gave the the US president broad authority to impose a range of economic
sanctions and restrictions on Syria. The White
House was initially reluctant to use the authority granted in it, but there
was an apparent change of policy in early 2005.

The acronym expansion given (in Swedish) above stands for `Swedish Airplane
Stock Company.' Hardly anyone now thinks of Saab as an acronym to be expanded,
any more than one thinks that of laser. Hence, the
company name is now an AAP-assisted pleonasm:
Saab Aktiebolag.

SAARC

South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. Comprises India,
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Bhutan and Nepal on the Indian
subcontinent, and the
islands of Sri Lanka and Maldives. Founded in December 1985, it replaced SARC.
SARC had comprised the same seven nations, but was a
failure.

SAARC publishes an Encyclopaedia of SAARC Nations, one volume for each
country. It has the thick glue and coarse cloth binding that are the marks of
any authentic South Asian publication (unkerned fonts are characteristic only
for SA publications in Western alphabets). The last
and least volume is for the Maldives.

Saturday Afternoon At The
Opera. A public service of CBC 2. Because
publicly funded entertainment is not limited by crass commercial profit
motives, it is able to provide the classy entertainment that is desired by all
people (okay, maybe just most people -- in the tonier parts of Newton,
MA). It is important for this entertainment to be publicly supported, because
the great masses of people (I count four) who yearn for opera can't afford to
pay for it all themselves.

I have to point out that there are some who don't see the wisdom of nonprofit
broadcasting. They point out, with some justice, that a small town with only
five stations playing top-40 and four playing classic rock'n'roll simply cannot
afford to waste spectrum space on a rare musical taste. If fifty percent of
the disposable income that is listening to the radio on Saturday afternoon
needs to hear Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion, then by God fifty percent of
radio stations should be playing Sweet Emotion on Saturday afternoon.

This name is suggestive. In Spanish,
sabio is `wise' and sabe is `he knows.'

Also in Spanish, tonto means `stupid' (the word estúpido
is also available). Tonto used to call the Lone Ranger ``Kemo Sabe''
(originally spelled ``Kemo Sababay''). It sounds like a gringo mispronouncing quimo sabe, which means
`gastric juice knows.' In the early episodes, the Lone Ranger also called
Tonto ``Kemo Sabay.'' Actually, quimo (`chyme' in English) refers to
the entire mix of stomach juices including partially digested food as well as
enzymes and hydrochloric acid. The same word is used in Portuguese. But in
Portuguese the word for stomach (estómago) is written without an
accent. Can you believe we also have an entry for bolo? No one knows (nadie sabe) what
``Kemo Sabe'' really meant, although there is no shortage of guesses.
(That link might expire; google
the question.)

Actually, SABI itself (remember SABI?) is a bit of a
misnomer. It's a ``news service that
covers the South American market and Mexico. SABI provides
extensive and comprehensive abstracts of articles from the main business Latin
American newspapers. This daily newswire service covers newspapers, business
and trade journals from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador,
Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Mexico.'' (My italics.) Then again,
in business circles, Miami is half-seriously called ``the capital of South
America,'' so it stands to reason. More at the MIA entry.

You know (¿Sabes?), as I was rereading this entry later, I thought
that the ``No one knows (nadie sabe) what'' was leading into a
``Shadow'' reference. Who knows -- maybe it was, in a shadowy way. The Shadow
knows!

SABIC

SAudi Basic Industries Corporation. This is the national monopoly for
petroleum derivative industries (primarily plastics) rather than for the basic
extraction and refining operations. (I don't know Arabic, but I'm pretty sure
they don't pronounce SABIC as ``'tsa bitch.'')

Society for American Baseball Research.
It's pronounced ``saber.'' ``The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR)
was established in Cooperstown, New York in August, 1971. Our mission is to
foster the study of baseball past and present, and to provide an outlet for
educational, historical and research information about the game.'' It is ``an
international organization headquartered in Cleveland, OH.''

SABRmetrics, sabrmetrics

Baseball statistics. The term is based on SABR
(supra), yet a pronunciation-based spelling (sabermetrics) is
also used. Some people make a distinction, and use ``SABRmetrics'' in
some restrictive sense such as ``computer-generated baseball stats,''
or baseball statistics in the usual sense of collective averages or figures of
merit, and excluding the kinds of individual stats that ``baseball stats''
normally refers to. I'm not sure these senses of the term are used very
consistently.

SAC

Steel Arch Construction.

SAC

Strategic Air Command.

SAC

Strong-Acid Cation-exchange. The SAC resins common in water treatment have
sulfonic-acid functionality. Cf.SBA.

SAC

Subscriber Acquisition Cost. The average cost of acquiring a new paying
subscriber. Marketing costs divided by the number of new paying subscribers.

You're probably wondering what colleges are not employers, and who handles
admissions and teaching and such at those institutions. Actually, all these
``Association[s] of Colleges and Employers'' are actually associations of
colleges and prospective employers of the colleges' graduates.

Supreme Allied Commander
AtLANTic. NATO acronym. The SACLANT is a U.S.
Navy admiral nominated by the President of the United States and approved by
the North Atlantic Council (NAC), NATO's highest
governing body. He receives his direction from the NATO Military Committee.
The Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic is a UK
Navy vice admiral.

As an adjective: pertaining to the sacrum and ilium (the upper part of the pelvis, from hip to hip
around the back), or more typically to the articulation between sacrum and ilium, or to the associated ligaments.
Used as a noun, ``the sacroiliac'' is the sacroiliac region or cartilage.

sacrum

A triangular bone, made up of five fused vertebrae, which forms the
back section of the pelvis. I haven't any more to say here, so you might as
well go back to the sacroiliac entry and see
if there are any interesting links to follow there.

Oh yeah -- sacrum is cognate with the English word sacred. It's
New Latin, short for Late Latin [os]
sacrum (`sacred [bone]'), itself a translation of the Greek
heiron [osteon]. How this bone came to be considered sacred, I
am tempted to say, God only knows.

SACU

Southern African Customs Union. Members, as of 2004, were Botswana,
Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland.

Seasonal Affective Disorder. Feeling sad during the winter from lack of
cheering sunshine. This might happen in the snow-belt parts of Buffalo, but
here in Amherst we're just as peppy as can be. I mean, we've got, like, more
sunny days per year than, um, Bismarck, North Dakota! And our latitude is more
than two degrees balmier than Paris, France. So there. For a related thought, see the
London entry.

Wait! There are a bunch of student homepages, but I don't see an official
page. Found it.

SAE

Standard American English.

SAE

Standard Average European [languages]. Coined by the famous professional
insurance adjuster and amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (the same fellow
who is most responsible for the urban legend about multiple terms for snow
in the ``Eskimo'' language).

Despite the ugliness of the term, it has not just a usage but a meaning. For
examples of the former, see Theories of Human Communication, 4th edn.,
by Stephen W. Littlejohn (Wadsworth, Belmont, 1992), p. 190 (ch.9).

Secure All-around Flotation-Equipped. A kind of boat manufactured by
SAFE Boats International, very popular with the US Coast Guard and local law
enforcement agencies. They look like RIB's, but
there's nothing inflatable about them. They have chambered aluminum hulls and
a foam collar along the gunwale for ``flotation, stability, and fendering.''
(I thought that what fenders do, etymologically at least, is fend, but
I'm happy to welcome a new verb into the vocabulary. By contrast, both ``to
broke'' and ``to broker,'' with similar meanings, are attested back into the
first half of the seventeenth century.)

SAFE Port Act

Security and Accountability For Every PORT ACT. SAFE here is a
grammatically unusual and interesting acronym. Most acronyms expand to noun
phrases, and most function either as adjectives (i.e., as
attributive nouns) or simply as nouns.
Occasionally such nouns are verbed. Here we have an acronym that doesn't even
expand to a standard part of speech, but instead to part of a noun phrase.
Specifically, ``Security and Accountability For Every'' is a noun phrase and
part of an adjectival phrase that modifies it. It is mildly interesting to
consider what results if one completes the object of ``For'' differently.
Because of the ``Every,'' some singular noun is needed. One could have
subsequent SAFE Port Acts, but not a SAFE Ports Act. Inconveniently, this
implies that the SPA might, at least in principle, assure safe ports, but only
SAFE port.

This cleverly named law was first introduced in the US House of Representatives
(as HR
4954) on the 127th anniversary of Einstein's birth. It was signed into law
on Friday, the 13th of October 2006. One day and 514 years previously, a
sailor aboard the Pinta had sighted land. On the 13th of October 1492, three
Spanish ships made port, such as it was, on the Bahamian island of
Guanahaní.

safety pin

First patented as ``Pin,'' in the year of the California (CA) Gold Rush. US Patent #6281 issued 1849.04.10 to
W. Hunt.

safety tip

Don't carry your workstation monitor by the power cord while wearing
in-line skates in a china shop very often.

safety warning

To minimize risk of serious injury, do not use this product.

Saffir-Simpson scale

A five-point scale for hurricanes.
A hurricane at point foo on the scale (foo = 1,2,...5) is said
to be ``a category foo hurricane'' or ``a category foo.''

Self-Aligned Gate. A beautiful idea. Originally, MOS transistors really were metal-O-S devices.
Source and drain were (doped regions) defined by diffusing or (originally less
commonly) implanting dopants to either side of the MOS gate, in an operation separate from the deposition of
the gate. Since the masking that defines these regions is inaccurate at some
level, the source and drain might either overlap the gate or not reach it.
Since the latter case is equivalent to an open, it is necessary to design to
err on the side of caution: to overlap the gate. This has two general kinds of
disadvantage: (1) increased parasitic capacitances, which increase time delays,
and (2) shorter effective gate lengths, with consequent greater sensitivity to
gate-length variations. Either way, the effective yield is reduced, or
equivalently (i.e., engineering to preserve yield), one has larger and
slower devices.

When poly-Si gates began to be used, a clever way
was found between the horns of this dilemma. The poly-Si gate is laid down before the source and drain,
and the implantation mask contains a window that exposes the whole region from
source to drain, including the gate. When the source and drain are
created by ion implantation, the MOSFET channel beneath the gate is not doped
because it is shielded from the ion beam by the poly-Si gate. The channel
(i.e., the undoped region between source and drain) is thus
``self-aligned'' with the gate. [Strictly speaking, the channel is rarely
``undoped.'' It is simply doped to the appropriate level and not further doped
by the source and drain implantations. In fact, because of surface states and
gettering of impurities to the surface, the channel region may need
pre-treatment before the gate is deposited. But in general, the channel is
less heavily doped than the source and drain regions.] The self-alignment game
also works with diffusion, but not as well: see DSA.

SAGD

Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage.

SAGE

Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. The SAGE air defense system was begun
in the 1950's.

SAGE

Senior Action in a Gay Environment.
The environment will probably be warmer, but may not be very gay if all the ice
melts. I suppose the seniors can look forward to not being around to find out.

Okay, that was then (as recently as 1997, if my printed source is correct), and
this is now. Well, by the time you read this it will also be then. The entry
will be more recent, but you will be older. That's what it's all about. This
SAGE has become a sealed acronym: ``SAGE
- Mozilla Firefox.'' Oops, that was the title bar. It's ``SAGE Services and
Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Elders.''

SAGE

System Administrators Guild.
A USENIXspecial interest
group for sysadmins. Perhaps the E in the acronym came out of a special
file that you can't access without sysadmin privileges. I can understand if
SAG was not deemed a very positive acronym, but failing to come up with a
creditable and publishable expansion for the SAGE
backronym looks unsagacious.

In the preceding, I have given standard translations which translate
erstarren as `to freeze.' It's worth noting that the semantic fields of
the two words are not quite equivalent. The verb frieren is a closer
match to its cognate freeze, being the preferred word to describe the
solidification of liquid associated with cooling. Although erstarren
has a similar meaning, and is used in the expression corresponding to my
blood ran cold, it is closer to `gel' or `congeal,' in the sense that
lowered temperature is not a necessary component of the concept. Hence, given
the ambiguity of such metaphors, a less poetic translation that nevertheless
captures different aspects of the original expressions would be ``Architecture
is music made solid.''

It is a commonplace among classicists that

A translation is a commentary.

(Or ``the shortest commentary'' or ``the best commentary,'' but that seems to
imply that it is impossible to have more than one translation.) The mot is
often attributed to Wilamowitz (Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff). Oral
tradition at Oxford attributes it to his student Eduard Fraenkel
(``best commentary'' variant), who was at Oxford from 1934.

School of the Art Institute
of Chicago. School associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). A number of buildings between the AIC museum
and the L are draped with ``School of the Art
Institute of Chicago'' banners across the outside of the second or third floor.
Some of these buildings seem unlikely to be classrooms, studios, living
quarters or anything else directly associated with the school. Maybe they're
boosters.

An article
appeared November 14, 2005, in the Arab News (``[Arab] Middle
East's Leading English Language Daily'' based in Saudi Arabia), dateline
Jeddah: ``Teacher Charged With Mocking Religion Sentenced to Jail.'' A
high-school chemistry teacher was sentenced to three years in prison and 750
lashes -- 50 lashes per week for 15 weeks. The lashes are to be given in the
public market in the town of Al-Bikeriya in Al-Qassim, so at least he gets out
of the prison occasionally. If the article link expires,
let me know and I'll put up some more
details.

Studies in
American Indian Literatures. A scholarly journal, published quarterly
(in most years since its founding in 1977) by ASAIL. The journal offers reviews, interviews,
bibliographies, and new works (including transcriptions of performances).
Reportedly (and I have no reason to doubt) it is the only scholarly journal in
the United States that focuses exclusively on American Indian literature. Oh,
sorry: literaturesssss.

sais

French: first-person, singular, present-tense
form of savoir, `know.' (I know, I know: I could simply have written
`[I] know.')

Spanish, `hall.' (It is also used for
`lecture hall,' but unlike English, in this use it needs no qualifier.)

This word is cognate with the Old English word sæl (`hall'). The
direct etymons of this word in English petered out early in the sixteenth
century, but the Germanic root had been adopted in Romance, giving rise to the
Spanish head term (spelled identically in Portuguese and Italian), and
salle in French. The Italian augmentative
form salone was adopted as salon in Spanish and French, and as
salão in Portuguese, eventually giving rise to the English word
saloon. Of course, the French salon is also used in English,
though it's not completely assimilated. What this little history shows is that
even when English loses, it gains. A word may try to sneak out of the
language, but one or two of its descendants or cousins a few times removed will
be sucked in. Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.

SALA

Statistical Abstract of Latin America.

Salamis

Two or more sausages, with or without
garlic, and an island southwest of Athens, pronounced differently (final sibilant
unvoiced). I put this entry here because during the Reagan-Gorbachev summit at
Reykjavik in 1986, a suspicious package was found and blown up. It was two
salamis. This is important; I vow to track down the details.

Okay: the salamis belonged to Assistant Defense Secretary Richard N. Perle. He
was regarded as the Pentagon's top arms control expert. He is a gourmet, and
like a good Cold Warrior he came prepared. In particular, he came prepared for
the reported inadequacy of Reykjavik's restaurants and the expectation of
all-night sessions, with the two salamis. He kept them cold by putting them on
the window sill of his hotel room (fourth floor), where they were apparently
blown off by a storm. Icelandic security guards successfully repulsed the
aerial attack. Perle was quoted in an October 15 article as saying that the
salamis were ``smashed to smithereens.''
They were ``Hebrew National'' brand.

On April 25, 2004, two teenagers in Lee County, Florida, were arrested on
arson-related charges. The unidentified minors (a high school and a middle
school student) had reportedly placed an incendiary device in a wooded lot near
some houses a few blocks from Interstate 75 in Fort Myers, but it had failed to
go off. Local residents were evacuated after it was found, and authorities
said it could have started a serious fire. The Southwest Florida Bomb Squad
blew up the device around 11 a.m. the same morning.

The device itself sounds like one of those science experiments you do with
stuff you find around the house. It consisted of a twenty-ounce beverage
bottle filled with ``homemade napalm'' (not clear if this wasn't just gasoline)
and two aerosol spray cans, tied together using kielbasa links.
News reports described it as a ``kielbasa bomb'' and ``sausages of mass destruction.''

Considering the degree of sophistication of the device, I wonder if they
weren't counting on it to become some hungry stray's suicide bomb. The entire
episode sounds just stupid enough that it might reflect a technical conception
based on sympathetic magic. You know -- soda bottles and spray cans both
contain liquids under pressure that can sometimes like, you know, go boom! Did
the bomb squad really check the ``homemade napalm'' thing? Maybe this was just
a snack: soda, kielbasa, and spray cheese.
Yum. (Preferably a diet soda, to neutralize the
fat in the other foods.) The
brand of kielbasa was not identified.

At 4:30 pm on April 18, 2005, an incident occurred involving sausage as a
missile, but no explosive. A 46-year-old man was driving home from work. It
was a nice day and he had the window down. As reported by Brian Farmer of the
PA, he saw a car coming the other way and suddenly
``felt a searing pain in his nose. He managed to stop his car without hitting
anyone else'' and passers-by came to his aid. He had been hit by a frozen
sausage. A spokesman for the Essex Ambulance Service said that ``[h]is nose
was undoubtedly fractured and he had lost quite a lot of blood ... he decided
not to go to hospital but has been left with a very painful and swollen nose.''
The AP reported from London that the Ambulance
Service spokesman spoke on condition of anonymity, but this is probably just an
interpolated conjecture. According to the Essex Evening
Echo, Essex Ambulance Service paramedic Dave Hilton said he
had not come across an incident like it in 30 years on the job.
The victim's decision leaves me with questions about the
UK's NHS. Absent
further details on his assailant's vehicle, I suppose that this was a
left-handed shot. There was no further information on the sausage.

You know, this kind of story is a headline-writer's bonanza. Here are some of
the better headlines under which the last story was reported:

``South Woodham Ferrers: Banger Mashes Nose.'' (Essex Evening Gazette;
the injured motorist lives in South Woodham Ferrers, and the incident occurred
as he approached the intersection of Inchbonnie Road and Broughton Road
there.)

``Flying Frozen Sausage.'' (From the CBS
News website. Pretty lame, but the next item was ``Flying for
Peanuts.'')

``Food is biting back.'' (Essex Chronicle.) Oh -- my
error. This is an item out of South Woodham Ferrers from the week before. It
was about a farmers' market for local produce, including a ``variety of goods
ranging from sausages to venison and herbs to olives.'' First time I recall
encountering the term ``meat farmer.'' (A Mr. Brew.) Jan White, of Althorne
Beef, said that with ``television programmes and media articles about the
origins of food and how it is treated by some retailers, people are coming back
to the markets.'' Aww, people worry too much.

Alright, enough about sausage ordnance. Here's an item out of Massachusetts, a highly advanced
blue state. In Newton, a dormitory community
for Harvard and some other nearby universities, there was a domestic dispute on
January 13, 2005. A woman showed up at about 12:30 am at the home of her
ex-boyfriend's female friend. She argued with the two, striking him in the
face and kicking him, and threatening to kill her. This story earned its place
in this entry on account of the female friend's car. The ex-girlfriend
apparently placed several slabs of salami on the trunk of the friend's car. By
the time officers investigated, they found the car's paint peeling. According
to Newton Police Sgt. Ken Dangelo, chemicals used to preserve the meat had
damaged the car's paint job. Initial charges were assault and battery with a
dangerous weapon for using the heel of her shoe during the fight (stilettoes?),
threats to commit a crime, and malicious destruction of property.

salami tactics

One slice at a time. Geopolitical conceptual cousin of the death of a
thousand cuts.

sal ammoniac

Old name for ammonium chloride (NH4Cl), in use since the Middle
Ages. The word sal is Latin for `salt'; the
adjective ammoniac (and hence the word ammonia) is a locative
ultimately derived from the name of the Egyptian god Amon (or Ammon or Amun, or
Jupiter Ammon in a Roman syncretism). The corresponding entirely Latin name
of the salt was sal ammoniacus; the corresponding
French is sel ammoniac.

The salt has the somewhat unusual property that the pressure of its
liquid-vapor critical point is below atmospheric pressure. Hence, when heated
it sublimates. Ancient manuscripts contain a number of recipes for producing
sal ammoniac, but many of these appear to be either ignorant or purposely
misleading. The primary method for producing it was essentially distillation
from camel dung: when camel dung was burned, the smoke contained fumes of the
sublimated salt. The salt would condense as a solid white film on a surface
(glass was convenient) placed in the smoke. (The salt is water-soluble, but
like ordinary salt it does occur in natural deposits. See
salmiac.)

I've had a tough time getting ahold of detailed information on camel dung, but
it is not surprising that ammonia salts should be present. The camel's unusual
and extreme metabolism is adapted to dry conditions, and an important
adaptation is to urinate as little as possible. The main reason that mammals
urinate is to get rid of the nitrogen waste from protein breakdown various
comes indicates the origin. Interconversion among different inorganic
nitrogenous compounds is not too difficult metabolically. Birds eliminate
nitrogen through the cloaca in the form of uric acid (so wash your car),
mammals (most of them, anyway) eliminate it in the form of urea. (I'll have to
look it up again, but in the interests of publishing this page soon I'll rely
on memory to assert that fish generally eliminate nitrogen through their gills
as ammonia.) Many micro-organisms can convert urea and uric acid to ammonia.
Presumably camels have evolved ways to eliminate nitrogen in their dung in
relatively dry form. It might be eliminated as urea and be converted to
ammonium chloride by bacteria in the camel gut.

A lot of camel dung was collected in the deserts east of the Egypt and south of
Cyrene. In an oasis of this desert there was a temple of the god Amon (you
will recall that Alexander took a side trip there before founding or
rechristening the Egyptian port of Alexandria). The desert took its name from
that oasis temple, and the salt took its name from the desert.

There were some trivial variants of the term sal ammoniac (including, in
English, sal ammoniack, sal ammonyak, sal amoniak, etc.). There is a large
subgroup of old names with the adjective beginning in arm- (e.g., sal
armaniac, sal armaniack, and even sal armagnac). These seem to have arisen
from a Latin spelling hammoniacum (with silent aitch) that was interpreted as
a misspelling of harmoniacum.

For centuries, sal ammoniac was used as a cleanser. My grandmother was still
using it in pre-WWII Germany.
Here's another application:

ALPINE EVENTS
A race should be held on hard snow. The snow should, if possible, be so hard
that no holes are made when contestants fall. If snow falls during the race,
the Chief of Course shall ensure that the newly fallen snow be packed or swept
from time to time. Course maintenance should be done continuously and
indiscriminately throughout an alpine race. Recommended as a snow additive to
lower the freezing point and harden the snow is ammonium chloride for above
freezing conditions and sodium chloride (rock salt) for below freezing
conditions. These preparations should be added to the snow on the course at
least one-half hour before race time.

Salary: Negotiable

If you will settle for less than we're willing to pay,
that's okay with us.

We don't want our less-well-paid employees to learn what
we're paying our better-paid-employees. Management understands
that knowledge is power, and stupid as they are, they realize
that that knowledge has to be the secrets they keep.

salicide

Self-aligned silicide. After deposition of poly-Si MOS gate and
exposure of S and D regions for implantation or diffusion, metal is
deposited over source, gate, and drain. This is subsequently sintered
to form silicides on each, and an etch removes unreacted metal while
leaving silicide. (Side walls of poly-Si gate are oxidized to form oxide
separator before metal deposition.)

A term used for naturally-occurring ammonium chloride. The term is
borrowed from German, which is the source of many mineralogical terms in
English. The German term was a contraction of the Latin sal ammoniacum.
The Latin term itself was borrowed in English as
sal ammoniac.

Salmiac is found as a sublimate at active volcanoes. (It can also be found at
inactive volcanoes if you can just keep it dry.

You can get an idea of how the formation process by pouring out saucers of
ammonia and (carefully!) hydrochloric acid, and placing them next to each
other. The ammonia vapor and hydrogen chloride gas react to form sal ammoniac:

NH (g) + HCl (g) --> NH Cl (s) .
3 4

The salt will precipitate and coat any surface suspended above the saucers
(petri dishes would be nice). Use glass or a transparent plastic sheet and see
it turn white. Don't wait for it to get thick. If it has any chance of
becoming thick, then you've poured out way too much of the reagents.
This reaction is not necessarily what is occurring at volcanoes. At normal
pressure, ammonium chloride sublimates at
338°C.

salol

A late nineteenth-century medicine prepared from SALicylic and carbOLic
acids. (To be a little more directly informative, it was the ester phenyl
salicylate.) By 1879 (date of the earliest attestation of the term listed by
the OED), the -ol suffix was being used fairly systematically in analytic
chemistry to indicate alcohols (which carbolic
acid is but which salol is not). However, -ol was already (as it still is)
used as a fairly uninformative ending in drug names, so it's not clear whether
the ol was intended as a reference to carbolic.

salicylic acid

2-hydroxybenzoic acid or orthohydroxybenzoic acid (or 2-carboxyphenol or
2-hydroxybenzenecarboxylic, if you want to be that way). Used as a callus
remover.

salsa

Spanish for `sauce.' The word sort of
implies `spicy' or at least `flavorful,' and is used as the name of a dance.
I can't think of an expression parallel to the Shakespearean ``saucy wench.''

An ionically bonded compound. The product, with water, of the
reaction of an ordinary acid and base. For example, with A and C
representing an anion and cation of valence -1 and +1:
HC (acid) + AOH (base) --> AC (salt) + H2O

A particular salt that gave this class of compounds its name: NaCl.
NaCl is the main ingredient in table salt. This is the kind you
sprinkle on eggs.

Pure NaCl is hygroscopic: it forms a hydrate and cakes. In order to
prevent this and allow for smooth pouring, table-salt manufacturers
add an ``anti-caking agent'' such as magnesium carbonate.

When salt is used for its hygroscopic properties, the
Mg(CO3) is excluded. One such application is in deicing
sidewalks and roads: salt is effective both because of the molal
freezing point depression of water and because salt is hygroscopic.
(A solution of water and salt freezes at a lower temperature than
pure water. The molal freezing point depression constant of water
is 1.86 C/m. m here stands for molality: a one-molal (1m) solution
has one mole of solute per kilogram of solvent.)

Jewish dietary law (kashrut) proscribes the consumption of blood,
and so requires animals to be kashered (or, increasingly,
``kasherized'') -- that is, the blood must be removed. ``Kosher
salt'' is used for this purpose. It's not called kosher because it's
kosher -- all salt is kosher. It's called kosher because it's
used to make meat kosher. Since hydration begins at the surface of the
salt crystal, coarse crystals keep better. And since this salt isn't
intended for sprinkling on food, there's no reason to make it fine, so
kosher salt is coarser than table salt. Some people taste and dislike
the anti-caking agents in table salt. Frankly, if the salt you're
using is going to be dissolved in water before it reaches the table,
there's likely no need for you to use table salt. Use kosher salt or
pickling salt (same product, different purpose).

Ice cream salt also uses no anticaking agents (and is sold coarse), but
since it's not intended for ingestion (it doesn't go in the ice cream;
it goes in the ice-water slurry around the ice-cream maker), maybe you
shouldstick to the other products for cooking. Popcorn salt is an even
finer grade of table salt.

The Salt Archive has as its stated purpose
``to collect evidence to support the theory that Common Salt and its short
supply from the then known sources had catastrophic influence on the
development of ancient civilizations.'' I would take this with a grain.

saltpeters

The unqualified word saltpeter has always been used for potassium
nitrate. A couple of other nitrates have been given what one might call ethnic
saltpeter names:

can be salted in the shell, by applying a salt solution and then drying. To
speed penetration of the solution through the shell, a small amount of wetting
agent may be added to the water. Generally, pressure and vacuum are applied
intermittently to increase the rate at which the solution reaches the interior
of the shell.

The idea behind the alternating cycle of pressure and vacuum is similar to the
idea behind repeated flushing of a vessel that can't be completely emptied.
Since the air inside the unbroken peanut shells can't be completely removed in
a single step, it is progressively forced out. At the beginning of a cycle,
water might be applied at, say, 120 psi. This is about 8 times atmospheric
pressure. (It's going to be exactly 8.000 at some moment as a cold front
pushes through after a warm day, okay? We're going to take it as exactly 8 for
purposes of explanation.) Assuming (it's a fairly accurate assumption) that
air behaves as an ideal gas, then under maximum pressure the gas is compressed
to one ninth of its atmospheric-pressure volume. The pressurization is usually
applied for about 4 to 8 minutes (that would be about one quarter to one half
of a kilosecond, for all you good people who don't understand stuff that isn't
in metric units). If this is enough time for mechanical equilibrium to be
achieved, then water (incompressible to a good approximation) has filled 8/9 of
the initial air volume in the shell.

[I'm also ignoring the fact that the peanut is compressible and that the shell
has nonzero thickness. If the peanut is substantially more compressible than
water, then the air's fraction of fluid (gas plus liquid) volume is reduced by
a factor even greater than 9. I do not have peanut compressibility data handy,
sorry. And yes, I'm ignoring the solubility of
air in brine and in peanut, and of water in air and in peanut.
Look, it's approximate, okay? Science is like that.]

In medieval Latin, it occurs as a sort of preposition (really a
prepositive adjective, but the gender isn't controlled by the noun, as
it should be; let's call it a function word), in legal expressions like
salvo servicio forinsico (`foreign service excepted'), salvo
jure (`without prejudice to the right of ...').

In Spanish, a preposition with
essentially the medieval Latin sense, which can usually be rendered in
English as `with the exception of' or `save for,' and occasionally
`save.'

In Spanish also, salvo means `I save,' a conjugation of the
verb salvar, from the Latin verb salvare. Note that the
saving here has a more restricted sense than the English cognate. To
save money is ahorrar dinero.

In English, the legal Latin word was naturalized as a noun, so the
salvo of a right is a provision that a certain engagement or ordinance
shall not be binding if it would interfere that right, and more
generally a salvo is reservation or a saving stipulation or legal
provision.

Sam

Nickname for SAMantha and for SAMuel.

SAM

Sample Analysis at Mars. A chemical analysis instrument that is part of
the rover Curiosity that was landed on Mars in 2012.

SAM, Sam

Scanning Acoustic Microscope. Surface and sub-surface mapping of elastic
properties using ultrasonic pulse/echo lenses in the frequency range 30 MHz to 1 GHz. Sample
must be immersed in or at least wetted by a fluid.

(You know how ess and eff sound the same over the phone -- people would reply
``Oh, yeah, phonic, sure.'')
But they can't win for losing. Now they have to explain that
`` `America' is understood to embrace North America, including Central
America and the Caribbean, and aspects of its cultures elsewhere in the
world.''

You can avoid these problems by joining the Society for
EthnoMusicology, but you may have to shift the orientation of your
scholarship. (But that's nothing, my friend Lee started out as a composer of
art [classical] music, and ended up as a music theorist. It's just as well,
he didn't really look like a composer.) Also consider the American
Musicological Society (AMS).

``The Society for Ancient Medicine fosters the scholarly study of ancient
medicine broadly understood: not only Greek and
Roman medicine, but also ancient Near Eastern, medieval European, Arabic,
Armenian, and traditional Indian medicine, and
indeed medicine from all pre-modern cultures.''

Southern African Maintenance
Association. ``SAMA was formed in 1997 to promote the interests of
maintenance and asset management professionals in Southern Africa. We are a
registered Section 21 company (not for profit).''

-samao

Japanese postfix particle that functions like Mr./Ms., but indicates
greater respect than -san. Cf.-chan.

Original name of the famous act that is now better remembered as
Amos'n'Andy. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll started broadcasting this in
fifteen-minute weekday segments on the Chicago radio station WGN in 1926. The
station owned the rights to the name, so they changed it when they moved on.
It was blackface humor without the video. It's already possible today to enjoy
the jokes Swedish-Americans and Finnish-Americans used to tell on each other,
but I suspect that by the time we can all safely enjoy Amos'n'Andy again, we'll
hardly be able to understand the jokes any more.

SAMO

Sensitivity Analysis of Model Output. Sensitivity analysis based on model.
This is really no more sensitivity analysis of the output than of the input:
the sensitivity matrix is simply the matrix of partial derivatives of output
with respect to input, with obvious significance for control and stability.

Let us send you two free issues of our wonderful magazine with ABSOLUTELY
no obligation! ``No Obligation!'' After you have been sent the first
wonderful issue of our wonderful magazine, you will be sent a wonderful offer
to continue the subscription at a wonderful rate. You will ignore this offer,
or the wonderful postal service will somehow magically fail to deliver it, and
after the second issue you will receive a wonderful letter alerting you that
our records show that you have not remitted payment for your one-year
subscription and that you should SEND PAYMENT NOW to avoid DAMAGE TO YOUR
CREDIT when we involve a COLLECTION AGENCY! Of course, if you have already
sent payment you may ignore this letter, but if you believe our records are in
error then you should contact us immediately. Use the phone number that is not
included in the dunning letter, but which you might with some difficulty find
on our website. [Information for the
convenience of our customers outside the US: don't bother looking. With
some exceptions, the 800 number probably doesn't
work for you.]

A representative sample of a larger set (what statisticians call the or a
universe) is an unbiased sample. Journalists seek samples that are
representative in another sense: they represent what the journalist wants to
report. For example, my friend Louis, who works in mental health, received a
call from someone at NPR who was looking for people
who were unhappy with services they had received.

Of course this is unbalanced reporting, but it might not be unfair. It can be
perfectly reasonable and efficient for journalists to look exclusively for the
man who bites the dog. On the other hand, in a large enough universe of men,
there will always be some man that bites a dog. To report an event is to imply
that it is newsworthy. Hence, in that large universe, to report an instance of
something that anyone could predict would be bound to happen occasionally may
be understood to imply that it is happening unexpectedly frequently. That is
what can make reporters' selective sampling irresponsible and dishonest.

Kurt Schlichter is a lieutenant colonel in the California National Guard. A
veteran of the first Gulf war, he's now stateside and commands the 1-18th
Cavalry, 462-man RSTA (Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition)
squadron attached to the 40th Infantry Brigade Combat Team. The last media
representative he spoke with before I contacted him was a New York Times
stringer who wanted Schlichter's help in tracking down guardsmen who were
``having trouble because they got mobilized.''

SAMS is a major publisher of computer manuals. It isn't immediately
obvious SAMS stands for. Last year I happened to pick up a copy of Computer
Dictionary and Handbook, by Charles J. Sippl, published in 1966, and
discovered that it stands for the last name of the publisher Howard W. Sams.

Spanish, `heals.' That's a third-person
singular present-tense verb form, not a plural noun. The Spanish sana
is also the feminine form of the adjective meaning `hale, sound.' (Male form
sano. For too much more about that, see the são entry.)

Once (from 1918) the capital of North Yemen (the Yemen Arab Republic from
1962, though there was a royalist insurgency for years afterwards), now (since
1990) the capital of the Republic of Yemen. There's a
bit about the pronunciation of the name in the aa
entry.

I'd like to add that, refreshingly for a Swiss organization, they don't force
you to read everything three or four times (in German, French, Italian, and
maybe Swiss German or Romansch). The first time I visited, the default German
webpages also had French
Doppelgänger (in a folder named frz, presumably for
französisch). When I checked again (2006) they'd come up
with an even more clever idea: ``All SANAS information is in English.'' Except
for scattered titles and links like Nouvelles and züruck. I
trust the scholars of Mexico, Quebec, and the Navaho Reservation are up in
arms.

sanction

One of those treasured self-contradicting words.
The word contranym has been coined for the class of words that have at
least one pair of senses that are contradictory, but the word has so far
(writing in Summer 2004) not been widely accepted. Part of the problem is that
contra- is a Latin root and -nym is Greek, so the
compound isn't kosher.

To sanction a practice, situation, or event is to approve it officially or
formally, while to sanction a country (more often ``to impose sanctions'') is
to disapprove using similar authority, typically with the institution of formal
impediments. (Trade sanctions are in the news.)

Sanguine, meaning both sanguinary and healthy, is
similar to these. In this case as in that of sanction, the usage of the
word in its different senses tends to take different forms or have different
collocations.

Of course, you knew all this. You may not have been aware that to table
has opposite meanings in US and Commonwealth
parliamentary usage: In Canada (.ca), a law to be
taken up for discussion is tabled -- one imagines the bill placed upon a
table for examination. In the US, when discussion of a bill under
consideration is to be suspended, the bill is also tabled -- one imagines a
bill that was being read to be put down on a table for possible future
consideration.

Although New Rome, Ohio, got all the bad press
as a speed trap, it's really I-80/90 in Sandusky
County, Ohio, that has the
really aggressive policing. Sandusky
is pronounced with stress on the second syllable, and a shwa vowel in the
first: ``sun DUSS key.''

SANE

I'm not exactly sure this was an acronym. It was originally created in
1957 by Norman Cousins, editor of the late great Saturday Review, under
the name National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, with the stated goal of
promoting causes such as disarmament in general. The group published some
NYTimes advertisements and grew from the
publicity. In 1959, SANE staged its first demonstrations, culminating in a
rally of 20,000 in New York City in 1990.

Benjamin Spock, the author, eventually became chairman of the national board,
which changed its name to SANE, A Citizens' Organization for a Sane World. The
group eventually split over an internal rule excluding members of the Communist Party from also being members of SANE. The
Spock faction was against the rule; the Cousins faction in favor. The Spock
faction won and the group became marginalized.

Norman Thomas was another prominent member.

SANE

Sexual-Assault Nurse-Examiner. It's usually written without hyphens,
presumably to designate the person who examines assault nurses who are sexual.

Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Laura Ingraham are all Great
Americans but they are each, individually and collectively, participating in
the destruction of our national political discourse and national existence
simply. I make this statement with all due care and regard because each of
these media pundits has achieved noteworthy and important attention and
audience from a large segment of average Americans. Just a few short years
ago, prior to Limbaugh's breakthrough radio program and the subsequent
appearance and explosive growth of conservative weblogs, these same Americans
were subjected to a steady diet of a monopolized media-generated and
media-dominated liberalism. The media-drumbeat in America, and the West
generally, advocating directly or indirectly for a Liberal-Progressive World
State, has been and continues to be supported by a university-trained Elite
corps of ``professorial intellectuals'' and ``experts.'' These Elites in turn
very often end up in diplomatic, bureaucratic, and technocratic positions
throughout government at all levels, further exacerbating the problem of the
Liberal bias in America. Granted, without the Limbaugh and Hannity voices, Dan
Rather would still be anchoring CBS; but without the Limbaugh and Hannity
rhetorical seduction, Americans would see the danger of the World State as very
much imbedded in the discourse of democracy, which is simply another name for
the Open Society.

Maybe I should have started with this: ``The far more dangerous Liberal bias is
found today throughout the Democratic Party and in the far left advocates of
the anti-America crowd as well as the moderate to conservative wings of the
Republican Party and even on conservative talk radio.''

SANEX

Selective ActiNide EXtraction.

sangfroid

The ability to stay calm in a crisis or catastrophe:
self-possession, imperturbability.

Sangfroid is a notch above stoicism: you have to be not so much resigned as
purposely functional. Also, strictly speaking, sangfroid requires the ability
to stay cool through the heat of one's own disaster. It's no trick to
be philosophical about other people's tsuris
(cf.Schadenfreude).

Sangro de Cristos

Today I read this name over a picture of a mountain in a brochure. (Today
as I write this. Not
today as you read this. It's not my fault if you procrastinate.) Thumbing
my nose at the great danger that I may be judged anal-retentive or worse --
a lover of language -- I venture to observe that this name means
`I bleed from christs.' Sangre de Cristo, in the same language,
means `Blood of Christ.' It's a mountain range in a part of old Mexico
called Texas.

Scale for the Assessment of Negative (psychiatric) Symptoms. Usually
administered together with SAPS. Comparable
to BPRS.

SANS

Small-Angle Neutron Scattering.

Sansei

Third-generation Japanese-American. Pronounced approximately ``sun say.''
Singular and plural forms of the noun coincide, because Japanese does not
inflect nouns for number. See first-generation entry for some
complicating thoughts.

Can you believe it?! I don't have a Santa Claus entry! Until I can devise a
permanent fix for this problem, please visit the (provisional) Moore entry.

São

Portuguese: `Saint.' The female form of the title is Sã.
São arose as an abbreviation of Santo, and is now the form
regularly used preceding a consonant. Hence São Francisco,
São João (that's `Joseph'), São Lucas,
São Paulo, São Pedro, but
Santo Antônio, Santo Agostinho, Santo Inácio.
With a period, são. is an abbreviation of the general
santo (`saintly, sainted, pious, holy, devout, blessed').
Interestingly, the expression santo de pau ôo means `holy terror'
(said of children, of course) as well as `pious hypocrite.' Literally, the
expression means something like `holy [one] of the hollow stick.' (The main
impediment to an accurate literal translation is the range of meanings of
pau, which like its Spanish cognate
palo may best be translated `stick, pole, club, wood [material]' in the
most common contexts, but has various other acceptions. In fact, this is such
a deep subject it will get its own entry. Eventually.)

Please now pop about three levels off the digression stack.

Because the nasalization of the vowel is difficult to distinguish from a
straightforward nasal consonant (and presumably because of aphesis of the final
o), o dicionário de Morais (formally Grande Dicionário
da Língua Portugesa, 10/e 1949) finds it necessary to warn against
the sam and san misspellings of this common word.

são

Portuguese: `well, healthy, hale.' The female form of the adjective is
sã. The expression são e salvo corresponds to
`safe and sound' (though inverted in order). The word são and
its cognates in western Romance languages (at least in Italian, French, Spanish
Catalan, and Galician, which I can readily check), all mean `healthy,' more or
less, as does the Latin etymon sanus. There
is no restriction to mental health.

On the other hand, the Latin insanus was restricted to mental ill
health. This carried over only incompletely to Romance. In Portuguese,
insânia and insanidade mean `insanity,' and insano
means `insane.' This is the general pattern, certainly for Galician, Catalan,
and French. In Spanish
too, insania is `insanity,' but insano is `unhealthy' (more
specifically, `deleterious to health'). Wait, wait! It's not just Spanish.
Italian has settled into the standard pattern, but insàno once
also had the sense of `ill, sick.' Anyway, I was trying to make the case that
somehow the influence of insanus in Romance was relatively weak, but
it's a weak case. Be that as it may, in English, apparently under the
influence of the restricted semantic field of insane, the word
sane also came to be restricted, referring now only to mental health.
Of course, English can afford to be profligate, having other words to cover
other portions of the sanus semantic field. For one there's
sound, cognate with Dutch gezond, German gesund, and
Yiddish gezint. The ge- (written with a yogh in Old English) became
a vowel in Middle English (isund, ysonde), at the same time that
the aphetic form (ultimately spelled
sound) became increasingly common. [A similar process was sometimes
arrested before the initial vowel was lost, hence German genug is
cognate with enough.]

The convergence of são and
São in Portuguese, cognates with
sano and San in Spanish, is
reminiscent of a similar situation in German and English. The English words
hail [the verb], hale, heal, healthy, and whole
are all derived from a common source of related words. These may originally
have had a principal sense of `healthy' or of `whole' with a connotation of
impregnable (think of ``physical integrity''). Through either of these senses
the words might have become associated with deity either before or at the
beginning of Christian proselytization. Anyway, German has a similar
constellation of words, and as it ended up, the noun Heil has among its
senses both `salvation' in the religious sense and `well-being.' (As you
probably know if you've seen a WWII movie or two,
Heil is used as a salutation also, parallel to English ``Hail!'' or
Latin ``Salve!'')

Student Activities Office. The activities they have in mind don't include
studying or what you thought of next. Actually, ``activities'' as understood
here are entertainments better described as ``inactivities.''

Statement of Administration Policy. I've seen this acronym used in
reference to a document laying out a US government policy. It's probably best
not to call this an explanation of administrative policy.

SAP

Strong Anthropic Principle. See Martin Gardner:
``WAP,
SAP,
FAP, and
PAP,''
New York Review of Books, May 8, 1987.

Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte in der
Datenverarbeitung. German: `Systems, Applications, & Products in Data
Processing. The name of an ERP software product
and of the company that produces it -- SAP AG.

As of early 2002, familiarity with SAP and the ability to install it (which
includes extracting data from legacy-system records) is one of the dearest
(i.e., highest-paid common skills in the IT
field.

Nonterminal p-sounds are aspirated by English-speakers. The pi-phi letter
combination that is represented ``pph'' in the English word Sapphic
(designating, for example, the eponymous style of poetry) was originally also
an aspirated p sound. The eff sound represents a corruption in languages that
don't observe the aspirated/unaspirated distinction. A similar thing happened
with the Hebrew pe (which used a dot to indicate lack of aspiration).
Interestingly, with the beyt (which became beta in
Greek), aspiration was transformed into a
difference in articulation -- the undotted beyt (i.e., aspirated; what
is written ``bh'' in transliteraton of, say, a Hindi or Sanskrit word like
Mahabharata) is now pronounced with a vee sound. Note that in Hebrew,
the b/v distinction is not phonemic except in foreign words that have not been
integrated into the language: context determines which allophone occurs. Greek beta is now pronounced
vita. So it goes. In Arabic, the b/p distinction of the original Semitic
alphabet is absent. (That's discussed in one or two other places in this
glossary. If you haven't seen it already, keep reading; it's bound to appear
eventually.)

Société américaine pour la philosophie dans la
langue française. `American Society for Philosophy in the French Language.' This putative organization has
such a low profile on the internet that I suspect the name is misremembered;
I've only seen the acronym SAPLF and the English name in a posting to a
philosophy mailing list.

SAPLF publishes a Bulletin, and in 2003 a special issue of the Bulletin was
published (volume XII, no. 1, 206 pp., two languages, USD 15 incl. domestic
postage), ``devoted to the work of Simone de Beauvoir - a late contribution to
the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Le
deuxième sexe.'' The table of contents lists one article entitled
``Pourquoi reparler de Simone de Beauvoir.'' My sentiments precisely. They
don't actually come out and say it directly, but I infer that they regard
Beauvoir as a philosopher. It's not a problem for me, but this kind of
thinking could have consequences.

If you think of a college as being divided into different departments in the
same way as a hospital is divided into wards, then SAPLF, with or without
surviving in-patients, would be something like an intensive care unit.

For another acronym ending in LF, see INaLF.
You know, if the French language were simply eliminated, that would free up a
lot of acronyms to be retasked for more pressing purposes. Especially in
Canada (to say nothing of Europe).

sapo

Spanish, `toad.' The p is aspirated, so
the pronunciation of this word is probably not very different from the original
Greek pronunciation of Sappho, famous love poet of Lesbos and hence in
at least one sense a Lesbian. The fragmentary nature of what has survived of
Sappho's poetry, and the little we know of her life, leave some question
whether she was also what we call a lesbian, but for the unscholarly,
uncertainty is no reason to doubt. (Perhaps I should add that ``scholar'' is
not defined by institutional affiliation, but by temperament and behavior.)

Arnold Lobel created a series of children's picture books about two pals named
Frog and Toad. From their clothes, it is clear that Frog and Toad are both
male. (Lobel died of AIDS in 1987, age 54, so
there was some talk. You probably want to know: he was survived by his wife,
also an illustrator, and their two adult children.) The characters' names
presented the Spanish translator, Pablo Lizcano, with a gender problem. All
Spanish nouns have grammatical gender, but for most
animals, and especially for wild animals, there is a single noun, with a single
grammatical gender, for each animal regardless of the number of natural genders
that animal exhibits.
``Frog and Toad'' in Spanish is ``Rana y Sapo,'' and while sapo
is male, rana is a female noun. Lizcano's
solution was to invent the name Sepo, which by
the usual rule is male. Quite unnecessarily, it seems, the character named
Frog in English (and who somewhat more closely resembles a frog than a toad)
has been given the name Sapo (`Toad,' remember?).

Unless, until, and probably even if I write a Matt Groening entry, this here
will be the place to mention the Akbar and Jeff thing. They are the principal
characters of Groening's ``Life In Hell.'' Here's a snippet of
an interview he
did for Flux Magazine in 1995:

Groening: Here's my standard reply: Akbar and Jeff are either brothers
or lovers--or both. Whatever offends you most, that's what they are. [pause]
Yeah, of course they're gay! Big commercial mistake on my part, by the way. A
big brewery approached me wanting to have Akbar and Jeff promote their beer.
...

It seems I don't mention it elsewhere, so I'll mention here that translating
the lyrics of (appropriately) Madonna's ``La
Isla Bonita'' (`the pretty island') poses a
gender difficulty also. As I heard it, she whispers the line ``Me dijo que
te quiere.'' An accurate literal translation of this would be `He or she
told me that he or she wants you [or that he or she loves you, or
that you are dear to him or her].' The gender of the third person (he
or she) is uncertain -- from that sentence at least. To be honest, not one web
page I can find agrees with my recollection of the lyric, and over a thousand
web pages disagree with me and claim that the song contains the at-best stilted
line ``Te dijo te amo'' (`He or she said to you I love you'). (The
Spanish is stilted. The English is less
stilted, probably because the Spanish is really gringo. At least
a thousand include the merely unusual ``El dijo que te ama'' (`He [or
almost It was he that] said that he loves you'). As Gary and I and some
graduate students drove to a conference many years ago, I replayed that bit
about twenty times in my earphone. I really think that everybody else on the
web is relying directly or indirectly on liner notes that may correspond to
only one or some of the versions released. Gary says he'll look for the
cassette.

saponification

The chemical reaction that makes soap. It's pretty straightforward: you
combine an alkali base -- potassium or sodium
hydroxide -- with fat. Sodium hydroxide is
lye. Someday this dangerous toxic substance will be subject to strict
government controls in order that each year a few idiots won't kill themselves
by accidentally ingesting it. For now, however, it continues to perform the
good work of natural selection, and is available at the store for other
purposes, like unstopping your drain. The main alternative to lye is potassium
hydroxide (KOH). Pure KOH makes liquid soap; 10% KOH (by molarity, not
molality: the reaction is stoichiometric) gives a significantly softer soap
than pure NaOH.
If you don't have access to lye, you can get NaOH from soda ash and KOH
from pot ash. As noted in the
K (potassium chemical symbol) entry, pot ash has such
a characteristically high potassium content that it is in fact the origin of
the word potassium.

Fat is glycerine esterized with a fatty acid at each of its three hydroxyl (OH)
groups, and saponification is an ester-to-salt reaction -- something like a
strong-base-to-weak-base reaction, where the fatty acid form organic salts with
the alkali ions.

Fat for soap comes as a byproduct of meat production. Where exactly the fat
is diverted for soap production is a matter of practical economics. Nowadays
slaughterhouses divert a fraction of their production. In my grandparents'
day, excess fat could be gotten from butchers. Further back, people would
trim fat when they carved up their own animals. If you didn't have fat you
didn't
have soap, and you used an alternative (see QS and almond powder entries). I suppose that in
lean years, people went dirty as well as hungry.

See the hard water entry for how soap works
or doesn't. It will be clear from that entry that one wants to use soft water
for soap production. In the old days, when people normally made their own
soap, reverse osmosis and demineralized water were not available. You don't
need much water to make soap, so distilling was practical enough (if you
already had the still for other purposes), but so was rainwater and some
well water.

The actual process of soap-making can get involved when you consider fragrance
(see EO and FO) and
color. A central constraint is that fat and lye don't diffuse very well in
soap, so the last bit of saponification takes a long time. This can be
mitigated by mechanical mixing (blending, stirring) and by using emulsifying
agents (like DPG). In the end, soap made with
only the minimum ingredients tends to remain harshly basic (pH about 9) from unreacted
lye. Mild acids may be used to neutralize the soap, but strong acids just
drive the saponification reaction backwards. Some fat may be added late in
the process. This is intended not to saponify, but to soften the soap. (You
might ask why not just use excess fat from the start. The answer is mostly
that by adding fat late, you can use nicer but more expensive oils --
particularly vegetable oils with desirable anti-microbial properties --
without having those oils wasted by being converted to soap with the rest of
the oils.)

In semiconductor usage, this is corundum (alpha-alumina, rhombic form of
Al2O3), a
colorless crystal. In common usage, different terms are used for different
forms of gem-quality corundum, which can be red (``ruby'') or
a range of other hues (esp. for blue: usual use of term ``sapphire'').

I don't know what the first pee is doing there, since it's not pronounced.

SAPS

Scale for the Assessment of Positive (psychiatric) Symptoms. Usually
administered together with SANS. SANS and SAPS
were developed by Andreasen.

SAQ

South Atlantic Quarterly. Published at Duke University.

SAR

Search And Rescue.

``Headquarters Air Combat
Command (ACC), through the Air Force Rescue
Coordination Center (AFRCC), is the single federal agency responsible for
coordinating search and rescue activities in the continental United States.
[Hawaii and Alaska -- you're on your own.]
It also provides search and rescue assistance to Canada and Mexico. Besides
coordinating actual SAR missions, the AFRCC is active in formulating SAR
agreements, plans and policy for the continental United States.''

SAR

Segmentation And Reassembly. Sounds like divide-and-conquer. Part of
getting data through ATM. See AAL.

SAR

Significant-Activity Report.

SAR

Sons of the American Revolution.

SAR

Special Administrative Region. A bubble of circumspect freedom around Hong
Kong. Macao is also an SAR. I don't know if there are any others.

SAR

Specific Absorption Rate.

SAR

Start-Action Request.

SAR

Structure-Activity Relationship[s]. The relationship between the chemical
structure of a molecule and the odor it induces. Cf.QSAR, SFR.

A high school pal of mine explained the formula for determining the expected
annual family contribution: one quarter of the value of the family home. Of
course, that was many years ago, before the big eighties inflation in college
costs. That outstripped residential-property appreciation, so the formula
must be different.

SAR

Successive Approximation Register. Part of A-to-D converter.

SAR

Synthetic Aperture Radar.

SARA

(New York) State Archives and Records Administration.

SARA

Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act.

Sarbox

Sarbanes-Oxley. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (Public Law No. 107-204, 116 Stat. 745), also
known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of
2002. A/k/a SOX.

SARC

South Asian Regional Cooperation. Launched in New Delhi in August 1983.
It failed because its name was an abstract compound noun describing what they
wanted to achieve instead of what they were, so it was replaced by SAARC.

Secretaría de Agricultura y Recursos Hidráulicos.
The Mexican government's erstwhile `Secretariat of
Agriculture and Water Resources.' All I plan to find out about it for the time
being is what can be gleaned at IMTA entry.

A gulf opening into the Aegeaen Sea, between Attica and the Peloponnesus
east of Corinth. The Corinthian strait, now a canal, connects the Saronic
gulf with the Gulf of Corinth.

The book Athens, by Christian Meier, begins with the story of the
evacuation of Athens in 480 BCE (ahead of
advancing Persian troops, delayed heroically at Thermopylae by a small Spartan
rear guard under the command of Leonidas). The Athenians retreated from Attica
across the water to Salamis. The maps on the
inside front and back covers label this body of water the Sardonic Gulf.

For those who prefer not to contract SARS, as well as for those who would like
to attempt suicide by contracting it and spending an unpleasant final week or
two on a respirator, a useful piece of information is the incubation period.
That is, the time people remain asymptomatic after infection. The incubation
period is typically about a week, but has been as long as two weeks in some
cases. (In many cases it's impossible to say precisely, since the particular
chain of transmission, or at least the moment of infection, is unknown.) So if
you want to catch SARS from people who don't seem to have the disease, your
best bet is to hang out with people who may have come in contact with the virus
in the past week or so. Visit the Middle Kingdom.

This new disease, which flared in Hong Kong in March 2003, was eventually
recognized to be the same as the disease that had affected many hundreds of
people in neighboring Guangzhou (what we all used to call Canton, and what is
also called Guangdong) province of southern China since the previous November.
In Guangzhou, and later elsewhere in China, the severity of the outbreak has
been repeatedly masked by government censorship, or more precisely by a culture
of secrecy and dishonesty.

The largest initial concentration of victims outside Guangzhou province has
been in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, SARS is not called SARS but ``atypical
pneumonia.'' BusinessWeek correspondent Bruce Einhorn and others
have suggested that the SARS name is avoided because of the similarity to
SAR, the technical designation of Hong Kong in terms
of its political status. Then again, in Guangzhou, it is also called (the
Chinese for) `atypical pneumonia,' which is a reasonable alternative to a
not-very-Chinese-pronounceable Roman-character acronym. For more on the
acronym, see the next SARS entry. Have a look at
the ARS entry as well.

In French, SARS is called syndrome
respiratoire aigu sévère as well as pneumopathie
atypique. In German it is Schweres Akutes Respiratorisches Syndrom.
In Italian, Sindrome Acuta Respiratoria Severa.

Even though you came here to find out about SARS as quickly as possible, you
find your attention wandering, and you ask yourself whether ``there could be an
etymological connection between the German word schwer and the Latin word severus.'' Semantically, it seems
not unreasonable: the German word means `heavy' or `difficult' and the sense
can be stretched comfortably to overlap that of the English word
severe. The Latin word severus, of course, has meanings close to
the English and French terms derived from it. (The English verb sever,
OTOH, has a separate Latin etymology.)
Coincidentally, I got to wondering the same thing myself, so I hopped on the
forklift and went to pull Pokorny off the shelf. Julius Pokorny's book Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch
[English: `Big book of wild-ass guesses']
lists both words, and lists them as coming from distinct (but partly
homophonic) Indoeuropean roots.
One root (Pokorny p. 1151) is [conjectured to have occurred as] *uer- and
*suer-, and had meanings related to `balancing,' hence schwer, `heavy.'
The Latin word came from a distinct root (p. 1165) that took forms *uer- and
*uer<shwa> meaning `[demonstrating] friendliness.' (Why don't we have a
word like that?) This led to words meaning `true' and to the negated form
se-verus, `without friendliness.' If you want to defend the claim that
linguistics is a science, one of your stronger pieces of evidence is the fact
that the conclusions seem ridiculous.

In other SARS-related language news, on April 25, 2003, President Gloria
Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines named her Health
Secretary Manuel Dayrit SARS Czar.
Why
didn't dubya think of that? (Uh, thank you, that
suggestion has already been submitted.) Dayrit was given sweeping powers,
including the authority to call upon the Armed Forces, the police and other
government agencies to compel public compliance and order quarantine, and the
power to order the examination of incoming and outgoing vessels and to suspend
classes or close schools to prevent the spread of the disease.

In a speech the following May 15, however, President Aroyo was already saying
``[i]lan ba ang biktima ng SARS sa Pilipinas, 10 [actually 12; she was unaware
of two newly confirmed cases], ibaba pa sa walo dahil yung dalawa na merong
pinadala ang blood test sa Hapon, pagbalik negative pala. Walo ang nagkaroon
ng SARS at dalawa ang namatay.'' I felt that you'd prefer to read it in her
own words. The English-language publication BusinessWorld felt the same way
(``Asian meet held to save SARS-hit travel sector,'' p. 12 of the 16 May 2003
edition).

Data from national health authorities are tabulated daily except Sundays by
WHO. Initially, the only explicit indication of freshness of the data was
release time, usually a specific hour around 15:00 GMT+1. After April 16,
2003, the tabulations have indicated the date of the latest update for each
nation's or region's data.

Under a variety of
conditions -- i.e., in a variety of theoretical models -- the numbers of
cases and deaths increase exponentially (equivalently, the logarithms of these
numbers increase linearly in time) until a substantial fraction of the
susceptible population has been exposed. Changes in behavior, treatment,
quarantine, or other policy, if effective, should be detectable by a change
in the doubling time of either of these numbers. All other things being equal,
cumulated statistics should minimize the fractional error due to statistical
fluctuations and allow those changes to be detected most clearly. Of course,
all things are not equal. In particular, data from the PRC have been
inaccurate (falsified at various levels) and have not been timely. Also, the
US data have been suspect in a different way. The CDC and WHO case definitions
do not correspond precisely, so in its cumulative reports WHO initially treated
``suspect cases under investigation'' from the US as comparable to ``probable
cases'' elsewhere. By the WHO report of April 19, this had led to the
following anomaly: the US had 220 reported cases, the third-largest number
among countries or regions reporting, and no reported deaths. The next three
countries were Singapore, Canada, and Viet Nam, with 177, 132, and 63 cases,
and 16, 12, and 5 deaths respectively. The next week, CDC physicians stopped
uttering inanities like ``we've just been incredibly lucky'' and started
reporting probable cases.

The following table gives the cumulative number of cases and deaths as
tabulated by WHO. Certain subtotals extracted from WHO's (I had to write
that) official reports are given in parenthesis: when numbers appear in a
format #1 (#2, #3), #1 is worldwide, #2
excludes all of the PRC other than Hong Kong, and #3
excludes all of the PRC. Furthermore, because I can't find probable-case
numbers for the US from the early period, and because the numbers were
relatively small, I have recomputed the earlier numbers by excluding the
originally reported ``suspected'' numbers and assuming the number of
``probable'' cases was negligible (zero).

Here's a flash from April 2005: ``The South African Revenue Service (SARS)
today launched its most innovative taxpayer education approach to date -- a
fictional cartoon character, Khanyisile Khumalo, conceptualised to be an
effective and personalised communication tool in its drive for sustainable
taxpayer education.'' I'm so excited! Khanyisile, meet Microsoft Bob.

Although South Africa has eleven official languages,
most tax forms on line appear to
be available only in English. That seems enormously unfair. Why do they only
tax English-speakers? The forms for filing an objection or an appeal are
available in separate English and Afrikaans versions. The estate tax and
retirement fund tax forms, and forms related to trusts and directives, are the
majority of bilingual (English and Afrikaans) forms available on line. Hmm.

For tax information in Afrikaans, a good bet would be to google on
"Suid-Afrikaanse Inkomstediens" (SAID). The name is apparently
Uphiko Iwezimali Ezingenayo eNingizumu Afrika in Zulu and
Tirelomatlotlo ya Afrika-Borwa in Tswana, but there doesn't seem to be
a lot of online tax help in those languages.

SARS

Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome. This is not the official name of any
known disease. It's an indefensible mistaken version of the SARS acronym for a major new disease first detected in
2002. The first ess in SARS stands for severe, not sudden. If you had any
sense and had followed the acute link when you
were reading the previous entry, I wouldn't be having to explain this.

Acute, in medical usage, implies sudden onset. The onset of anything
implies some degree of severity, so the word acute is sometimes used
loosely to mean severe. In my experience, however, physicians are
pretty consistent in keeping to precise usage: acute is distinguished
from chronic, and severe is distinguished from mild.
To have called a disease ``sudden acute foo'' would have been redundant.

SART

Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology.

SARTOR

Standards And Routes TO Registration. A document issued by the (British)
Engineering Council. Guidelines for how the professional bodies such as IEE should determine accreditation rules for
post-secondary programs (Br. ``degree courses''). I imagine that the SARTOR
guidelines tell those professional bodies what to wear.

I probably wouldn't have put this entry in but for the resonance with the
completely unrelated SATOR.

SARV

Standard
American Edition, Revised Version (of the Bible).
Also called the American Standard Version (ASV).
First published in 1901. This was the
American edition of the British Revised Version (N. T. in 1881, O. T.
in 1885), which was in turn based on the KJV (1611),
which was in turn based on the Geneva Bible and the Coverdale Bible, which were
in turn enormously indebted to the Tyndale Bible (WTT).

In detail, what happened was that a group was put together in Cambridge, UK, to create a new Authorized Version for the Church of
England, to succeed the earlier Authorized Version (the KJV), with more modern English expression and revised
understanding based on research and creative speculation in the intervening
nearly three centuries. They were eventually joined by an American Revision
Committee, but it was agreed that the Episcopal Church in America would not
authorize any other edition for fourteen years after the work was completed.
In return, the Americans got an appendix listing their demurrers at the end.

The English group disbanded after finishing its work in 1885. The American
Revision Committee officially began work to issue an American edition in 1897.
(This reminds me of presumptive 1984 Democratic
Presidential candidate Fritz Mondale insisting that he had not yet begun to
think about whom he might
consider as a running mate.) The American committee finally wrapped up in 1901.

Work on an updating of the SARV began in 1959, and was able to take advantage
of some of the earlier work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and work on cognate
Semitic languages. (For an example of how the latter can be useful, see the
the entry for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor
Dreamcoat.) The revision of the revision was published in 1977 as the
New American Standard Version (NAS). I love that
word standard. Many other Bible versions are based on the SARV.

SAS code-shares with Cimber Air, a regional
carrier. (We took a large propeller airplane from Copenhagen to Wroclaw.)
They pronounce Cimber with a hard cee, like ``KIM-bur.''

SAS

The School of Advanced Studies of the
University of London. The SAS has a bunch of institutes, such as the
IHR (historical research) and the
ISA (studies of the Americas).

SAS

Semester At Sea. It sounds
like the Semester Before Dropping Out, but it's actually an educational cruise
operated by the Institute for Shipboard Education in partnership with a
university (currently the UVA) that hires the
faculty as visiting lecturers and grants academic credit to students.

SAS

Side-Angle-Side. The theorem that if two triangles have two corresponding
sides of equal length and the angles between those sides have equal measure,
then the triangles are congruent. Cf.SSS and AAS.

SAS

Special Air Service. ``Britain's famous commando force,'' says Mark.

It sounds like Air Mail Special Delivery to me (it probably is sometimes).
The British Post Office used to
manufacture lasers. The persistence of original
names of British delivery organizations leads to confusion.

State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. A
PRC government body that does annual performance
evaluations on China's State-Owned Enterprises (179
in 2004, the first year for which evaluations were made public). They are
graded on the following scale:

Outstanding.

Good.

Fair.

Poor.

Failing.

China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC), Shenhua Group, and China Shipping
Group led the list of 25 SOE's that were graded A. Grades of B and C were
given to 141 companies. Nine were in group D for failing to meet some
performance targets, and four unidentified companies received a grade of E
for poor management and poor (i.e., discovered) faking of financial
reports.

On one hand, grade inflation does not seem to have had as great an impact here
as in US education. Then again, China Southern Airlines, plagued by financial
ethics scandal, only dropped from B to C. In August 2005, police arrested its
vice-president, Peng Anfa, on charges of embezzling and accepting bribes.
Because of major accidents at their production facilities, China Coal Group was
downgraded from A to B, and Sinohydro Corp from B to C.

A specialized sort of past participle related to the verb to seat.
In any restaurant with a hostess or host, entering customers are said to be
seated when they are distributed to seats, even though it is fair to say that
they seat themselves when they sit. However, the waitress in whose section
(or ``station'') they sit and are seated in neither sits nor is seated. She
may be said to be sat or have gotten sat with, the entering party. There are
related usages. For example, if there is a sudden influx, or if the hostess is
an idiotess, or for whatever other reason, three parties may be seated in one
section at once. That section's waitress is then said to be triple-sat.

sat

Past tense of sit.

SAT

Scholastic Aptitude Test. (Original expansion; later name change discussed
below.) A test administered by ETS,
primarily to US senior high school students whose performance on the test is
used as a basis for admission decisions by post-secondary education institutions
(primarily colleges and universities).

The reality is that most such institutions are not really very selective, and
many that require these tests needn't, since they'll accept pretty much anyone
with a high school diploma. Students planning to go to these schools are
paying the $28 test fee (in 2004) only to flatter their schools' conceit that
they can afford to turn someone away. (Japan has a similar situation, but
handles it slightly differently. Most schools use a common entrance exam which
pretty rigidly determines which students will go to the University of Tokyo,
which to the second-best school, and so forth down through the seven or so
clearly ranked schools. Because the system is so transparent, it would be
difficult for the least selective schools to participate and disguise the fact
that they really exercise no discrimination among applicants other than not
enrolling those who can't pay. For this reason, a number of schools write and
administer their own independent entrance examinations, offering them at
schools in areas from which they hope to recruit. We would call it saving
face.)

Nevertheless, a large minority of students do want to enter the small
minority of schools that can afford to be selective.
(In the US -- we're back to discussing US students and US schools.)
The professional duty of admissions officers at selective US schools is to
engage in two related deceptions:

They must encourage students who clearly are unlikely to be
admitted that they have a good chance to get in.

They must claim that they take a range of factors sensitively into
account when making admissions choices.

The purpose of the first deception is to pump up the number of high school
applicants. The number of admissions slots is essentially fixed, so increasing
applications decreases the acceptance rate in inverse proportion, making the
school seem more selective. No one asks about the SAT scores of rejected
applicants, so getting another numbskull to apply is all gravy for the school's
reputation. (You think those highminded educational institutions are above all
that? Check yer wallet, fellah', and see ``marketing'' below.) Heck, maybe
they can turn a tiny profit on admission fees.

Separately, a good ``yield'' -- a high fraction of admissions offers accepted
-- is also desirable though less important. The instrument for improving this
number is the school's early-decision program.

The purpose of the second deception (that many factors blah blah) is to support the first deception.
An admissions officer who knows a student's SAT scores, high-school
GPA, and ethnic or racial group can easily estimate
whether the student is likely to be admitted. Often just one or two of these
data will be sufficient to pretty much guarantee a yes or a no. It is true
that, as conscientious admissions officers are bound to emphasize, all sorts of
considerations like charitable work, unique experiences or difficulties
overcome, strength of teacher or alumni recommendations, the weather on the day
the officer's work-study reads the applicant's file (okay, don't emphasize
that) all play a role in determining which students get in. It is also true
that they rarely play this role. It's a simple matter of logistics.
Say you have ten thousand applicants for -- never mind the rest: ten thousand
applications is ten thousand applications! I've never graded more than fifty
exams at a time.

In 2004 or so the content and format of the SAT were changed. As you
understand from the foregoing, the details of the exam are really only
important to a fortunate few and an unfortunate few more, all going crazy in
the year before graduation, so I haven't been feeling like updating this entry.
Herewith, then, a very incomplete history of The Test.

The two principal parts of the
exam, ``Verbal'' and ``Math,'' are timed multiple-choice exams graded on
a scale of 200 to 800. There's also a
writing test, described at the GRE entry.

A raw score is determined by a simple formula (explained at the 200 to 800 entry) that deducts a little for
wrong answers. In this way, a test-taker who guesses wildly and one who just
enters no answer will do equally well on average. (Someone who can eliminate
some possible answers will tend to get credit on educated guesses.)
The reported score was initially just this raw score, which was approximately
normally distributed with a mean close to 500. Over time, performance
on the test has varied. (Umm, you're to understand that means performance has
declined.) Now the score is computed by massaging or curving the
raw score by using
a look-up table translation, so that the distribution of scores resembles
a normal curve with a mean close to 500. Because raw scores have been
declining, an April 1 (really!), 1995 readjustment of the scoring
algorithm has made it possible to obtain an ``800'' on the verbal test with
four wrong answers. This is partly due to a fetish that ETS has about not
giving a ``790.'' As a result, there was a sharp increase in the number
of 800's (and of scores in general) in 1995. [It is possible to
receive a score of 790 on an achievement test (now called SAT II). Or at
least, it has been possible. In 1974 I ran out of time, guessed ``B'' for the
last five
questions on the Chemistry achievement test, and got a 790.] The new SAT
scoring was discussed in a NYTimes article, 1995.07.26, page B6:
``When Close is Perfect: Even 4 Errors Can't Prevent Top Score on New S.A.T.''
byline James Barron. Not mentioned in that article was the fact that the
readjustment moved scores in what used to be the middle range of ability by
about 100 points -- old combined SAT scores of 840 or 940 are roughly
equivalent to new SAT I scores of 960 or 1030.

In late March or early April 1995, the Wall Street Journal revealed that many
schools inflate their students' average SAT scores for student guides in Money
magazine and US News and World Report. Names
were named. One university admissions director explained that this was a
``marketing strategy.'' [See the NYTimes
1995.04.09 article, Frank Rich byline.]

Also in 1995, the official expansion of SAT was changed to Scholastic
Assessment Test. This name change addresses a major problem. The SAT
is essentially an IQ test. The intention when it was
originally designed (in the 1930's) was to measure ``intelligence,'' conceived
as an innate attribute of the testees. The particular application was to help
Ivy League schools identify ``diamonds in the rough'' -- smart kids (boys) who
had not had the advantages of a prep school education. Over time, the testers'
thinking evolved. Now most psychologists and psychometricians regard
``intelligence'' as something profoundly influenced by both genetic
(i.e., ``innate'') and environmental factors. The tests have not
changed (much, since the 1940's) and thus what they measure has not changed.
The tester's idea of what it is that the tests measure has changed,
but out of pride and a certain professional reasoning (that whatever they can
measure is what ought to be called intelligence), the testers continue to use
the same terms to describe the measured datum: ``intelligence,'' ``aptitude.''
In principle, none of this need ever have been a problem if only professionals
were ever involved. (In fact, the College Board wanted to prevent testees from
knowing their own test scores, but abandoned the effort in the early 1950's.)

Standard Assessment Tasks. The common name of a sequence of UK-government mandated exams of school-children, taken
in three stages at ages about 7, 11, and 14. The stage-three SAT's determine
tracking into GCSE sets, q.v.

SAT

Stanford Achievement Test. Provides an assessment of primary and secondary
school students in major subject areas: mathematics, reading, language/English,
science, and social science.

The ninth edition (``Stanford 9'') replaced the eighth (``Stanford 8'') in 1997.
The new version was not normed against the old, even though the calculations
are trivial for the test designer to do. This non-norming makes it difficult
to compare older scores and see how badly achievement is declining over the
long term. That's a feature, son, not a bug.

You've heard about it -- there was a big to-do on its first release
(1995-04-05). It's supposed to be a two-edged sword, helping intruders
as well as security administrators. Nevertheless, the open doors it looks
for are so well-known and easy to walk through that it basically just helps
the halt and lame of both communities. Since it reports problems without
directly enabling the SATAN user to exploit them, the Stammtisch unanimously agrees that it primarily
serves as a useful warning to security-challenged sysadmins while creating
the smallest possible increase in danger from newbie intruders.

SATC

Sex And The City. A long-running daytime soap opera on
HBO. It's a girl thing; I wouldn't understand.

SATC

Students' Army Training Corps. WWI version of
ROTC, except that the officers in training were not
headed for the reserves. The program was organized by the U.S. War Department,
with eight-week semesters to be given on college campuses across the country.
(The courses of study were developed by a Committee on Education and Special
Training of the War Dept.) Military conscription had dramatically reduced
regular college enrollments, so for many schools an SATC contract was critical
for survival.

`Know-how' in French. The definition of this
phrase as used in English is typically something like ``the ability to do and
say the right thing in any social situation.''

save for translation

There is an interesting difficulty translating save into
Spanish. Okay, it's not interesting, but
you're not likely to read this entry by accident, so what the hey.

To save money (dinero), whether at a bank (banco) or a sale
(venta), is ``ahorar dinero.'' To save a life is ``salvar una
vida.'' (Salvavidas is a `lifeguard,' but a guard in the usual
sense -- the kind with a gun or truncheon or persuasive demeanor -- is a
guardia.) To save (something) for later is guardar para
después, although guardar also means `put away.' The verb
guardar seems to have taken on the meaning of save in computer
contexts. See also the knickerbocker discussion in
this K entry.

Surface Acoustic Wave. This is vibration that can be generated and
detected by interdigitated combs of metal fingers that have been deposited
on a piezoelectric surface. Useful mechanism for delay lines.

A Message from the
President in the newsletter from August 2001, Pres. Amy Thurmond, MD,
observes:
``Ten years ago when the first fellowship in women's imaging was offered the
concept was controversial and debated. Now more fellowships are being offered,
jobs specifically for women's imagers are advertised, and the American College
of Radiology Appropriateness Criteria Task Force includes a section on women's
imaging.''

Saw palmetto berry extract is touted as a treatment for benign prostate
hypertrophy (BPH). It's supposed to inhibit the
activity of the enzyme that converts ``good'' testosterone into
dihydrotestosterone and improve older men's sexual potency.

There don't appear to have been a great many scientific studies of the
effectiveness of saw palmetto, but some results have been quite encouraging.
In the largest study to date, the researcher (Jane) leaned over the railing
looking over the crowded center of a big shopping mall and shouted ``Any man
here who's still having trouble getting it up after taking saw palmetto?''
and determined that the wonderberry is 100% effective. VideED.

Also, it's recommended by talk-show host Larry King, who would lose count of
his ex-wives if he didn't have the bills to pay. Because this is a celebrity
endorsement, an FCC regulation requires that the
endorser have actually used the product.

Joe
Namath was the legendary quarterback of the New York Jets, famous from the start
with his sensational half-million-dollar signing in 1965 to the upstart AFC. He brashly predicted victory over the
heavily favored Baltimore (later Indianapolis)
Colts of the NFC in Super Bowl III (Jan. 12, 1969), and he delivered (final
score 16-7). Gimpy knees and multiple leg surgeries forced him into retirement
in 1972. In 1974, a television ad aired that pans along a pair of pantyhosed
legs, upward to reveal jersey #12 and Joe Namath. In his attenuated Alabama
drawl, Broadway Joe says ``Now I don't wear panty hose, but if Beautymist can
make my legs look good, imagine what they'll do for yours.''

Did he really wear pantyhose, or just nylon stockings? What kind of name is
``Beauty Mist''?

SAWSJ

Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice. (Pronounced
``sausage.'')

There's a popular cartoon about forbidden romance -- a wolf and a sheep.
Silhouetted against the night sky, they
meet secretly. He brought flowers, she eats them appreciatively.

Say's Law

Law named after French economist
Jean Baptiste Say (d. 1832), which states that
increased production increases demand. Except in exceptional circumstances, of
course. Loosely speaking, it was John Maynard Keynes's thesis that Say's law
did not hold in theory, but that a savvy government could make it hold in
practice, producing full employment and other good stuff (as if being fully
employed were a good thing).

Sb

Stibium. Latin name of
the chemical element antimony. Sb is the official systematic chemical symbol
for antimony, and in fact the only common one.

The Roberts & Etherington Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology for Bookbinding and the
Conservation of Booksclaims that
antimony is black in its amorphous form, and has been used in this form since
the late seventeenth century to
blacken the
edges of book pages. Trust me, no elemental metal is widely available in
amorphous form. It's finely divided (powder in suspension), and most metals
look black if divided finely enough.

Sammelbuch. Full title Sammelbuch griechischer Urkunden
aus Ägypten. `Collection of Greek
documents from Egypt.' Has appeared at regular
intervals since 1913.

SB

Santa Barbara. One of the spiritual microclimates in the California state
of mind.

SB

Schottky Barrier. A junction between metal and lightly doped
semiconductor, exhibits diode behavior. (Heavy doping doesn't change the
barrier height, but can make barrier sufficiently thin to allow tunneling
conduction around the Fermi energy. This tunneling situation is called
an Ohmic contact.)

SB, S.B.

Scientiae Baccalaureus. Science Baccalaureate. An engineering degree
in the US.

Super Bowl. The ones from 1996 to 2005
have been designated triple-X. This won't happen again for another fifty
years.

Like most people, I watch the SB for the ads and the frantic half-time show.
In 2004, I noticed that one of the most irritating sponsors was hawking a drug
that is pushed by some of the most irritating spammers. During half-time, the
crotch-grabbing was generally tame by current rap-video standards. More than a
couple of the performances featured partial disrobing. It didn't get a rise
out of me. I watched that half-time show on a wide-screen
TV in a room with a dozen or so
Catholic-university students. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 7 was the reaction
to the end-zone interception of a Tom Brady pass, Janet Jackson's
Justin-Timberlake-assisted tit-flash rated a 0. (But it did merit
recognition in the
degradation entry.) And the people who get
a kick out of mock violence against women probably weren't
rolling on the floor after the horse-fart
commercial either.

In 1972, I missed getting extra credit on Mr. Coulter's Electronics exam
because I didn't know that S.B. stood for Super Bowl. Don't let
this happen to you if you can possibly avoid it.

Status of Black Atlanta.
An annual report published since 1993 by the Southern Center
for Studies in Public Policy (SCSPP) at Clark
Atlanta University (CAU).

SBA

Student
Bar Association. Put your beer mug down, it's not like that. It's the
student government at the law school, not necessarily in any formal way
associated with the ABA. The link above is to
the UB SBA. The SBA exists to give ambitious law
school students something to put on their résumé, even if
they can't get a spot on the Law Review, and incidentally serves to
demonstrate that engineers aren't the only professional illiterates.

SBA

Susan B. Anthony (dollar coin). The abbreviation appeared briefly
on pin-ball machines and some other coin-operated equipment, before it
became obvious that the coin was a blunder.

SBA

Standard Beam Approach.

SBA

Strong-Base Anion-exchange (resin). The SBA resins common in water
treatment have quaternary amine functionality. Cf.SAC.

S band

The designation for a range of microwave frequencies. Actually many
frequencies. The traditional S band is 1550 to 5200 MHz. These are the frequencies supported in
single-mode propagation by a particular diameter of circular-cross section
waveguide. The diameter is determined by a plumbing gauge associated with a
someone named S_____.

S-Bahn

German: Schnellbahn or Stadtbahn. Literally
`quick railway' or `city railway.' A rail line that's occasionally called a
suburban railway or city railroad in English. In Berlin (BE) there's another line that's called the
Stadtbahn, so S-Bahn there ought to stand for Schnellbahn
if it stands for anything.

SBAW

Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
German, `Proceedings of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.' The philological
study of classical antiquity is within the bailiwick of this Bavarian academy,
so this is one of those instances in which the term sciences, the
conventional translation of Wissenschaften, is misleading. (More at the
Geisteswissenschaften
entry.) When classicists cite SBAW, they generally mean more precisely
Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Philosophisch-Historische Klasse (SBAW, `section for philosophy and
history'). There is also a journal ABAW.

SBB

Schweizerische Bundesbahn. German name of Swiss (.ch) national railway. The acronyms in all the other
languages also consist of one double letter and one single:

S-Bus Circuit. This was introduced by Siemens, and no further expansion of
S Bus was supplied, so I suppose that S Bus might be expanded Siemens Bus.
This is what lexicographers call an ulterior expansion.

SBC

Single-Board Computer.

SBC

Soleil-Babinet Compensator. A compensator is a device in the beam path
which can insert an adjustable phase shift (a delay, in effect). Also
BSC.

SBC

Southern Baptist Convention. As of 2007, it's the second-largest church
body in the U.S. However, demographically it has been stagnant or in decline
since around 1998. For detailed demographic information, see
this page from
<adherents.com>.

SBC

State Board for Charter Schools.

SBC

Student Basketball Congress. A kind of union of US college basketball
players. First formal intercollegiate meeting held in September 2000. They
don't represent players in negotiations, but the
NCAA listens to them. Amateur athletics -- what a business!

You know, the more colleges have a kind of farm system too: they'll recruit
players who may not be academically eligible or athletically quite so
desirable, and get them into a cooperative junior college. For example,
Indiana University (in Bloomington, Indiana) and University of Nebraska (in Lincoln) and
other schools have sent players to Iowa Western.
Iowa Western Community College is in
Council Bluffs, IA. Their teams are known as the Reivers, which apparently
are some sort of river pirate.

Another popular school of this sort is MCI, Maine C--- Institute (forgot the
name, can't find a listing, this is bad). Oh well, then, let's have a link
to NJCAA (National Junior College Athletic
Association).

Société Batrachologique de France.
They publish a quarterly journal Alytes.

SBF

Société Belge de Filtration. The name always seems
to appear in French, but
this search (with a bit of luck) is a conference jointly sponsored with
the Royal Flemish Engineering Union (I guess: Koninklijke Vlaamse
Ingenieursvereniging).

State Board of Forestry. In California, the SBF is ``a
nine-member board appointed by the Govern[at]or, which is responsible for
developing the general forest policy of the State, for determining the guidance
policies of the [California] Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and
for representing the State's interest in federal land in California.''

Sustaining Base Information Services. A US Army initiative to modernize
software in their ``business'' functions (as opposed to their ``business-end''
functions. Extremely ambitious, and way behind and over budget.

The first-phase contract was won in 1993 by a consortium led by IBM Federal Systems, which was sold to Loral.

Standard Book Number[ing].
A system that was a precursor to the ISBN system.

The Old SBN's are nine digits long, and become ISBN's by the addition of
an initial zero: in the ten-digit ISBN, the first digit identifies a country
or group of countries; zero (as well as one) is number for the English group,
including the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and
New Zealand.

SBO

Station BlackOut. A nuclear-industry term for an event in which a plant
loses all sources of power. After the accident at Three Mile Island
(TMI) in 1979, this became a kind of event for which
US stations were required to plan and prepare.

S body

The design of the Jaguar XKE and related models. Stands for Sport
model, but equal credit will be given for the answer ``Sexy'' body.

Special Bar-Quality [steel]. Used both as an adjective (e.g., ``1.5
mil tpy of SBQ steel rounds was used by
GM's automotive sector in the late 1990's'') and as a
noun (``the independent forging industry consumes
around 1.4 mil tpy of SBQ in rounds and billets, of which about 900,000 tpy is
bar''). Please don't ask me what any of this means.

Sick Building Syndrome. Still a rather controversial diagnosis: sometimes
a significant poison is found, sometimes mass hysteria is suspected. OSHA apparently defines SBS as whatever
building-related problems are left over when you take away building-related
illness (BRI's) of known origin, so the term is
pretty much guaranteed to remain controversial by definition, regardless of
research progress.

One effect of all this is to make
housecleaning more glamorous and high-tech than it's been since the
widespread introduction of jet-age ``labor-saving'' devices during the
fifties, the golden age of home appliances. (Videremote control.)

Sick Building Syndrome is also called Tight Building Syndrome (I
haven't seen ``TBS'' used as an acronym in this connection, though.) I
like to think of this as related to the slang sense of tight as
drunk; unfortunately, the etymology is related to `air-tight.'
Increased care to seal-in temperature-regulated air began in earnest
during the oil crisis/embargo of 1973 [a war measure imposed by medieval
Persian-Gulf states (GCC) to punish the US for
supporting Israel's effort to remain in existence]. Energy-saving measures
have meant that indoor pollutants accumulate to higher levels.
The claim is bruited about that it's now ten times (or a hundred times, or a
thousand times;
i.e. much) more dangerous to be indoors than out.
In 1994, UB became a non-smoking campus, meaning
that you can't smoke indoors. Since then, the entry areas to building have
become a million times more dangerous than the indoors.

The new chemistry building on the north campus has one chimney per fume hood,
emerging as a silvery stack at the top of the building. This is now the
most recognizable building on campus. If you remember that it looks like a
chocolate-and-mocca layer birthday cake for a centenarian, you can't miss it.

SBS

Smart Battery System. One that tries to conserve power, that monitors
battery power charge and takes increasingly aggressive measures as charge
falls. Deep discharge of any kind of battery degrades it and reduces its
subsequent ability to take, hold, and deliver a charge. Loss of power to a
microelectronic circuit can result in loss of information. Gradual loss of
power to a disk drive, if mishandled, can lead to physical damage.

A smart battery system is a peripheral device that communicates with the system
it powers. In addition to one or more ``primary'' bateries, it includes
testing and recharging components, all controlled through a smart battery
management system. It looks like batteries have pulled ahead of toasters in
the race to be the smartest dumb device.

Styrene-Butadiene-Styrene RUBBER. The rubber used for wheeled-vehicle
tires. There's an informative SBS entry in the
Macrogalleria.

SBT

Single Business Tax. It's a tax unique to the state of Michigan, but I
don't think that's what the ``single'' refers to. I think it means there's no
other direct tax on all business income (i.e., excluding sales tax).
The tax is described as ``essentially taxing payroll.'' As of June 2006,
Michigan has a 7.2% unemployment rate -- far above the US average. (The
unemployment rate actually fell marginally from May, with no increase in
employment: fewer people sought jobs.) Income is declining. Legislation has
been introduced to replace the tax with some other form of business tax.
(You know, a bad economy is simply the fault of the government. The fact that
US automakers based in Michigan have been losing market share for a few decades
has nothing to do with it.)

SBT

South Bend Tribune.
Represents the interests of plebians before the Roman Senate. Okay, maybe not.
They have this promotional slogan: ``South Bend Tribune: Discover what's in it
for you.'' Oh, I see -- ``in it'' -- inside the newspaper, I get it now. Very
clever. It would never occur to anyone that ``what's in it for you'' is the
mantra of selfish cynicism, nah.

SBT

Surface-Barrier Transistor.

SBTC

State Board of Tax Commissioners.

SBTTL

Schottky-Barrier Transistor-Transistor Logic
(TTL). Logic gate family in which a Schottky diode
is used to clamp the collector-base junction into reverse bias, to prevent the
long charge-storage delays that occur if a transistor goes into saturation.
You could check out
``Design of Schottky-Barrier Diode Clamped Transistor Layouts,'' by
R. A. Heald and D. A. Hodges: IEEE Journal of
Solid-State Circuits, vol. SC-7, pp. 269-275 (August 1973).

SBU

Sensitive But Unclassified. US government acronym.

SBVT

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

SBWP

Space BandWidth Product. The bandwidth is presumably of spatial frequency.

Chemical symbol for scandium, the lightest transition metal.
[That is: the lightest transition metal in the modern sense of ``transition
metal'': the lightest element whose isolated neutral atoms have an electron
occupying an orbital with total-angular-momentum quantum number greater than 1
(a non-s and non-p orbital).] Scandium bears some chemical similarity to the
rare-earth elements, so for some purposes it is
classed as one.

Abbreviation for Latinscilicet. See
longer entry at longer abbreviation scil.

SC

Label code for Secretly
Canadian Records. It's based in Bloomington,
Indiana (a few miles west of Indianapolis), where
Jonathan Cargill and Chris Swanson attended Indiana University, and where they
founded the company in 1996.

SC

Security Council. A
fifteen-member body within the UN, consisting of five
permanent members with veto power, and ten representatives from the general
membership, serving on a rotating (i.e. limited-term) basis.

The five permanent members are the ``victorious powers'' of WWII: China (.cn), France
(.fr), Russia (.ru), the
United Kingdom (.uk), and the United States.

When Nixon made the ``opening'' to (Mainland, Red, Communist) China,
Taiwan (.tw) was tossed out of the UN and
the People's Republic took its place. When the old Soviet Union
(.su) collapsed, Russia kept the old seat.

There is agitation from various sides to change the present system. Many
nonaligned nations want to end the veto power of the permanent members. Some
larger nonaligned nations (India, and some others
such as uhh, well, anyway, India is one) want a
permanent added member from the third world. The West is basically ignoring
all that and pondering whether to add Japan and/or
Germany.

SC

Self-Consistent. Not many people are, but mathematical models offer the
opportunity to apply this term.

Southwestern College.
Located in Winfield, Kansas, it is definitely southwest of Topeka (the capital
of Kansas) but clearly in the southeastern quadrant of the state. I guess the
name refers to the southwest of the US, a part of the country it is not far
from. For some other schools with ``Southwestern'' in the name, see the SU (Southwestern University) entry.

SC uses the epithet ``The Premier College of Kansas.'' Even this modest
self-assessment might be contested by other Kansas institutions. Hmmm: the
``premier'' claim is in little letters on the logo. Maybe it's just an
official part of the name and they're actually trying to soft-pedal it.
Lessee, the page for
Professional Studies Centers states without false modesty ``[a]s the
recognized leader in non-traditional education, Southwestern College has made
completion of bachelors degrees convenient, accessible, and job focused.''
What I want to know is, do they offer degrees in premiering? According to this page, they
have degrees in Business Administration, Criminal Justice, Nursing, and
Pastoral Studies majors (among others). Heck, skip the tedious education step
and just be president.

``Southwestern College is accredited by ... the University Senate of the United
Methodist Church ...''' and other organizations.

SC

Specimen Current. In electron beam microscopies (both
SEM and TEM), this
refers to the current passing through the specimen. That isn't
straightforwardly the primary-beam current, because the primary beam generates
secondary electrons (these have low energy, so they only escape the specimen if
they are generated near the surface. There are further complications. In TEM
the sample is thin and secondary electrons emerge from both sides of the
sample. In SEM, once the primary-beam electrons enter the specimen, they are
subject to multiple scattering, and a fraction of the current appears as a
diffuse current of backscattered electrons with perhaps 80% of the initial
energy. These electrons also generate secondary electrons, of course. In the
usual mode of operation of SEM, one creates (i.e., the SEM electronics
creates) a graph of secondary electron current as a function of primary-beam
position. There are other ways to create an electron micrograph. The
second-most common, after the variations on the secondary-electron scheme, is a
plot based on the intensity of backscattered electrons. Then there are methods
based on specimen current.

For the imaging of semiconductor devices, there is a special kind of
specimen-current-based imaging method called EBIC
(electron-beam--induced current). This uses the fact that most of the energy
lost by an electron beam passing through a semiconductor device goes into the
ionization of atoms in the semiconductor (that's where the secondary electrons
come from). In device terms, that means that the electron beam generates a
highly localized density of holes (on the order of thousands per electron in
the primary beam). EBIC generates an image using the specimen current measured
through an ohmic or Schottky contact. (That's right: as the capitalization
indicates, Ohm's identity has been submerged in the Nachlaß of his work;
Schottky's hasn't been, yet.)

After you've spent the best part of your academic career burnishing your
creative (``and how'' mutter the medievalists) medieval (or
mediaeval) credentials, you may feel a need to
fill the resultant lacuna in your academic vita. A typical way
to recycle your experience is to include something like

PERSONAL
Rose to position of treasurer in SCA, a foobar organization.

The problem is always: what to write for foobar. Some anachronists have
so much trouble deciding on an appropriate description that they send out an
incomplete résumé, and the
interviewer asks them ``What's a `foobar'
organization?'' This is not a turn you want your interview to take. If you
feel uncomfortable using the F-word (`fe*dal') in the groveling-for-a-job
context, then you could just leave `SCA' unexplained and unexpanded, or get a
job through your SCA connections and start a little fiefdom locally.
Alternatively, you can do the honorable thing, taking courage from the melees
you've survived, and display your true colors. Ideally, you go to work for
Disney.

I'm sorry, I guess I just don't have any good solution for this problem.
Fundamentally, the difficulty is that you want to define precisely the
quantity of attention that the reader of your vita devotes to this
item: enough to notice some extent of experience, not enough to strain
his or her limited tolerance for weirdness. You know that time and
chance happeneth to them all, so precise control does not obtain.

You know, in one sense the SCA is the least governmental of NGO's. It survives
on voluntary contributions by its members rather than on government subsidies,
and it doesn't attempt to speak on anyone else's behalf in the councils of
government.

Synagogue Council of America. The only US Jewish religious organization
with Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox (OU)
representation. It collapsed in 1994, after the Reform movement voted to
recognize patrilineal descent. (Yeah, yeah, it's more complicated than that.
Look, this is just a glossary, okay?)

SCAAP

SuperComputer Automotive Applications Partnership. A useful guide to
understanding the world might begin by dividing people into groups on the
basis of whether they think computers or automobiles are sexier.

SCAD

Savannah College of Art and Design.
``SCAD'' is used informally as a proper noun, and pronounced like the singular
of scads. It doesn't take a definite article. It would be cool if it
were referred to as ``a SCAD,'' but I guess you can't have everything. Ina has
a son who's just finishing up there. It occurs to me that having a friend
named Ina just increases the difficulty of detecting typing errors.

A few years ago, some students at SCAD were so unhappy that it made national
news, but I only had a link here instead of an explanation. Now (2007) I can't
remember what it was all about. It probably had to do with crime, because the
main campus of SCAD is in a high-crime area of Savannah. But maybe it was
because of faculty issues. Faculty at SCAD generally do not have tenure, but
work on one-year contracts.

SCAD was founded in 1978 with 71 students. By 2004, with about 7000
students, it was the largest art college in the US. It occupied more than 50
buildings totaling more than 1.5 million square feet, and was credited with
helping to revitalize Savannah's historic district, restoring buildings that
were either vacant or in disrepair. I think I can begin to see how the
high-crime thing happened to come about. That year, it started scouting sites
in metro Atlanta where it could open a satellite campus called SCAD-Atlanta,
that would offer graduate and undergraduate courses in ``advertising design,
animation, architectural history, art history, broadcast design and motion
graphics, and interior design.'' It eventually selected a site that was just a
short walk away from the campus of the Atlanta College of Art, which happened
to be struggling at the time. The next year, months after celebrating its
centennial, ACA was absorbed into SCAD-Atlanta.

SCADA

{Supervisory|System} Control And Data Acquisition.

SCAF

Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. The military junta that took power in
the wake of the 2011 ``pro-democracy'' demonstrations in Egypt.

Self-Contained ALgol Processor. One of the
programming languages that was a finger exercise for the
BASIC performance. See this
DART entry for others.

SCAM

ScAlMgO4.

SCANDAL

SCAttered Nucleon Detection Assembly. It's installed at The Svedberg
Laboratory (TSL) in Uppsala and described by J. Klug
et al. in ``SCANDAL -- a facility for elastic neutron scattering studies
in the 50-130 MeV range,'' Nucl. Instr. Meth. vol. A 489, pp.
282ff (2002). Now all they need is ``A School for Scandal.''

scansion

The analysis of verse into metrical patterns.

For example, Eugene Onegin is in fourteen-line iambic tetrameter, with the
rhyming scheme

ABAB, CCDD, EFFEGG.

The pattern of masculine and feminine rhymes is systematic as well,
following

An adjective with the same meaning as scanty. The words differ
grammatically in that scant rarely functions as a predicate.

SCAR

Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

scar city

SCARCITY with a space in the middle. I would have written ``scar-
city'' if I made it a practice to use multi-line head terms. I think it's cute
how it can be momentarily difficult to recognize a word when its hyphenated
parts are also words. Can we say ``free and bound morphemes''? ...
Sure we can!

I was at a writers'-group meeting a while back and silently corrected ``scars''
to ``scares'' on my copy of a draft under discussion, then laughed when I
realized that it was supposed to be ``scarce.'' The writer explained that she
couldn't remember how to write the word she wanted, so she just left it wrong.

Scientists Center for
Animal Welfare. As of July 15, 2000, they don't know how to punctuate
their own name, and they can't get their own homepage to display on a browser
with both style sheets and JavaScript enabled. This does not inspire
confidence in their judgments on less trivial matters.

SouthWestern Community College.
This is the one in southwestern North Carolina. The one in southwestern Iowa
is SWCC. For some other schools with
``Southwestern'' in the name, see the SU
(Southwestern University) entry.

SCC

Special Coordinating Committee. During the Iran hostage crisis, an SCC was
formed and so called by the NSC.

Source Code Control System. Configuration management system from
AT&T that traditionally comes bundled with Unix. Consensus seems to
be: at least use RCS, it's better in most ways.
However, most of the complaints apparently refer to the command-line version,
which is not being improved any more. There is a
visual version of SCCS. There are in fact many alternatives. See
this
Configuration Management Tools Summary.

Society of Catholic College Teachers of Sacred Doctrine. Founded in 1953,
it's now called the College Theology Society, and
publishes a journal with the not-especially-unusual title of Horizons.

The Spring 2004 issue of Horizons (volume 31, no. 1) had a
section entitled ``College Theology Society Fiftieth Anniversary Essays.''
The first essay, ``Present at the Sidelines of the Creation'' (pp. 88-93) is by
Gerard S. Sloyan. This is a different Gerard from my pal mentioned at the Diogenes entry, just so you know.
Sloyan writes

As to what brought the [society] into existence, it was not so
much the generally jejune character of the classroom teaching of religion based
on the seminary courses and textbooks available as it was the professional
feelings of the men and women engaged in the work. They knew that they were
poorer prepared at the graduate level than faculty members in
other departments. Some of the priest teachers doubled in brass as chaplains
of women's colleges (and some in colleges of men), a detail that led colleagues
to discount their academic seriousness. A lack of respect came from another
quarter. The various religious brother, sister, and regular and secular clergy
college presidents invariably had doctorates in other fields. This coupled
with their remembered formation in a religious institute or seminary, qualified
them in their own minds as knowing more about what should be going on in
religion departments than the people instructing several sections of fifty
students and more. They knew it had to be inferior because its practitioners
had never written a Ph.D. dissertation like them.
[I never realized that college presidents were like Ph.D. dissertations!]

He mentions later that the early agitators who brought the SCCTSD into being
were primarily members of groups in Washington, New York, and South Bend.
Interestingly, the South Bend group were not at Notre Dame but at its sister
institution, Saint Mary's College, and at
River Forest House of Studies.

There was a real contest among textbooks, and one of the entrants mentioned was
``Theodore Hesburgh, a young instructor at the University
of Notre Dame.'' As I sit here typing this glossary entry at the Rev.
Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., Library, late one Summer evening in 2004,
retired university president Father Hesburgh is probably still at work in his
office twelve floors above me. (Fr. Hesburgh was university president from
1952 to 1987. This is probably as good a place as any to note that in the
1960's, he invited a young European theologian, Joseph Ratzinger, to teach at
Notre Dame. He turned down the invitation, writing that he felt his English
was not yet good enough. When he became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, at the age
of 78, news reports said he spoke ten languages.)

In the early years, Horizons published a few ecumenical articles, but
that trend petered out. The Society itself remains Roman Catholic, though it
has held biennial meetings with the Baptist Professors of Theology since the
mid 1990's. The disappearance of the word Catholic from the society's
name turns out the have little to do with ecumenism and much to do with an
extensively debated question of grammatical ambiguity: did the first word in
the noun phrase ``Catholic College Teachers'' modify the second or third word
or both? At the 1967 annual meeting (Pittsburgh), a vote decided that the
proper concern of the society was ``College Theology.'' I think the society's
name change came not much after. Theologians have to tie up all the loose
ends. I don't.

The organization, affiliated with the MLA, publishes the journal SCE
Reports. According to this page,
Stanford University has a quarterly called SCE Reports that describes
spending by Resident Fellows and I don't know who else. If I ever
learn the expansion, I'll probably make it a separate entry.

Single-Channel Electron Multiplier. A low-power alternative to a
photomultiplier tube (PMT). A small curved
glass tube with a high surface resistance (at least on the inside wall)
and a high secondary electron emission
coefficient. Typical gain of 107.

SCEMC

Snow Control
Equipment Manufacturers Committee. It ``has operated as a product-related
organization under the NTEA since 1979. Its goal
is to promote the manufacture and use of safe and efficient snow control
equipment.'' Defeatists! Appeasers! ``Control'' is not enough: we must never
compromise with the White Menace! Ever onward to victory! Victory!
Snow shall be defeated.

(Global warming entry coming soon. Before 2050, at the latest.)

SCent

Second Century. Now called Journal of Early Christian
Studies (JECS). Catalogued by TOCS-IN (search on JESC).

Standard Cubic Foot. A measure of gas quantity used in the drilling
industry. A standard cubic foot of gas is the amount of gas that would occupy
a cubic foot at a temperature of 60°F and a pressure of 14.7
psi.

Student Credit Hours. The number of students times their average
number of credits.

SCH

SubCortical Hyperintensity. ``Cortical'' as in brain cortex.

Schadenfreude

Pleasure in another's misfortune. A German compound noun that could be
translated literally as `sadness joy.' Systematically capitalized in German
because it's a noun; sometimes capitalized in English, depending on the degree
to which one judges that it has been naturalized.

In principle, I suppose it could be pleasure in another's sadness of whatever
provenance -- through specific misfortune or otherwise. Then again, sadness is
usually regarded as some kind of misfortune in se. However, I think
that the typical context involves ``another'' with whom one is not (or more
like is no longer) in immediate communication. In this situation, the typical
misfortune one is likely to know of is the substantive sort.

This is completely absurd; not only are the words insanely long, but many of
them resemble the original Greek and therefore each other, reducing diversity
and facilitating mutual comprehensibility among languages. These are problems
that English can solve. The word should be something like the Dutch or
Albanian outliers -- whizbang or zingptooey or tweetmeow -- but not suggest
anything in particular. I think buzzpoppery would do nicely. The
adjective would be anything totally different.

Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786) was the first person to produce oxygen
(cf.Priestley). Scheele also
discovered other elements: manganese, molybdenum and chlorine, but the
discovery of oxygen led to the overthrow of the phlogiston theory, which is a
colorful story. [Scheele was only the first produce oxygen; he didn't discover
it because he could explain his results to his own satisfaction in terms of the
phlogiston theory. His detailed reasoning is outlined at this
site.] Scheele also discovered hydrogen sulfide,
hydrogen fluoride [HF
(aq)] and hydrogen cyanide. He tasted them, as
chemists generally did then. He died young. Maybe for those chemists, there
was a reason why the good died young. It has been proposed that Newton's
madness or extreme unsociability came about from his alchemical experiments.
During periods of intense alchemical research, he would eat and sleep in the
same room where he evaporated mercury...

A popular early method of producing oxygen was by the reduction of mercurous
nitrate [that's mercury (II) nitrate: Hg(NO3)2]. It was
widely used in the making of felt hats in the nineteenth century. Over time,
they would inhale or ingest enough to suffer mercury poisoning; thus arose the
expression ``mad as a hatter,'' an expression possibly preserved in the
language by Lewis Carroll's `Mad Hatter' character.

One common sense of the word scheme is plan of action. This
often has a negative connotation, as of a plan to achieve selfish or immoral
goals, typically by means partly of concealed or secret actions. This is
described in the OED2 (1989) as its current most
prominent use, and one which colors the many other senses of the word to
varying degrees. I guess one can see that in the hackneyed ``grand scheme of
things,'' where scheme is no longer necessarily understood to imply a
conscious plan. The dominant use doesn't seem to color the sense of ``color
scheme,'' suggesting that scheme is a kind of lexical mordant.

Anyway, the description fits US usage well enough. A closely related sense of
scheme occurs in the phrase ``pension scheme.'' That term is used
widely in the UK and rarely in the US (the US term is
``pension plan,'' much less common in the UK). Thirteen other OED2 entries do
include the phrase ``pension scheme'' within definitions or quoted examples,
with the earliest dated instance occuring in 1935. This
phrase and others like it (recording scheme, compensation scheme, ombudsman
scheme, etc.) seem to account for most occurrences of the word (as noun, the verb disappearing) in UK usage (i.e.,
in .uk webpages). The occasional exceptions seem to be older texts. Another
example of this new collocation pattern, or perhaps revived older sense, is in
the phrase ``housing scheme.''

The new OED edition offers an additional sense of
scheme as short for this phrase in Scottish colloquial usage, but that
is not enough. The negative connotation of scheme should be identified
as ``chiefly American'' or at least not British. (Of course, if you're in the
opposition, loyal or otherwise, perhaps government schemes do seem to
have a nefarious or at least misguided element.) Australian usage, as
suggested by the expansion of HECS, apparently
parallels UK usage. The word scheme also occurs in the phrase
``incontinence pad scheme'' quoted at our entry for the (Western Australia)
AABIC. There seems to be a real divergence in usage
under way here.

Now I'm going to give an example of the (incidental) use of the term ``housing
scheme.'' The example comes from pp. 90-91 of G.N.M. Tyrrell's Homo Faber:
A Study of Man's Mental Evolution (1951). (You may as well know that I'm
only doing this to assuage the accountancy of my conscience, which knows it was
a waste to have skimmed even this much.)

... Behind the working of our rational mind lie forces which rise up to it from
the instinctive level and also forces which descend to it from the unadapted
level. Both can influence the mind unconsciously. An example of the latter
kind is provided by the building of the
medieval cathedrals. The great and prolonged
effort which was put into these permanent messages in stone can surely not be
accounted for solely by the intellectual beliefs which their builders held.
The real driving force must have been unconscious; for the cathedrals have a
significance which cannot be expressed in language. They were not built to
provide places of worship in the deliberate way in which a modern government
might decide on a housing scheme. If one sits in a cathedral, especialy if it
is empty, and, so to speak, feels it, the conviction comes home to one
that it is the crystallization of a message that could not be expressed in
words. No formal doctrine or dogma is enshrined in it but a reality which
enters from beyond our life in time. It is this which must have inspired the
planners and builders to carry on their long and laborious work--although they
could not have said as much if they had been asked.

Karl Schiller, born in Breslau on April
24, 1911, was one of the most celebrated actors in German economic policy.
Schiller served as Bundeswirtschaftsminister (`Federal Minister for
Economic Affairs') during the ``Grand
Coalition'' of 1966-1969, working closely with Finance Minister
(Finanzminister) Franz Josef Strauss (long-time head of the
CSU). In a later red-green coalition, he held the
two posts simultaneously (in German: zusätzlich). Like Alex
Moellers, whom he succeeded, he was for this reason (I've been reading too much
German, ich glaube) called a Superminister (in German:
Superminister).

Schilling

German for `shilling,' descendant of the
Roman solidus and hence worth 12 Pfennig (denarii) and one
twentieth of a pound.

The situation was a bit more complicated in
medieval Austria and Bavaria, which used a
``long'' Schilling worth 30 Pfennig as a unit of account. I'm
sure at the time that someone thought this made things simpler. Eventually, it
became the name of the currency of post-imperial Austria. It remained the
monetary unit (currency symbolATS) until replaced by the
euro. The conversion was at a rate of
1 EUR = 13.7603 ATS, or approximately
1 ATS = 0.07267 EUR. See also Groschen, a subsidiary unit.

SCattering of Heavy, Low-Energy Ions with CHanneling. A code written by
Ned G. Stoffel of Bell Labs, which computes ion penetration distribution for
energies in the kilovolt range. The code TRIM,
which uses Monte Carlo path simulation in a jellium model (i.e, which
ignores crystal lattice effects), predicts penetration on the scale of about
100 Å; with channeling in <110> directions included in this
code, one obtains numbers more like 1000 Å, more consistent with
experiment. VideCHANDID.

Reported in 1992.

schleichen

German: `to creep.' Schleich would be the imperative form.

Schmaltz, schmaltz

Cooked fat. Very popular with those who like it. The German word (always
capitalized) refers to any fat, typically lard. The Yiddish word typically
refers to chicken or goose fat since lard is treif (unkosher). I used to think
that Schmaltz was only goose fat, until one day when I had a discussion with
Bernie. Apparently Schmaltz was goose fat if your family could afford it. My
mother loved goose fat, and for a brief period when she was a child in Weimar
Germany her mother could afford it. A couple of years ago my mother started
writing her memoirs and I read one vignette that had nothing directly to do
with Schmaltz. It ended approximately ``and this shows that I was very
interested in food even before it was scarce.''

Yiddish is written in Hebrew (originally Aramaic) characters, so capitalization
is not an issue as it is in German written with (any more-or-less) Roman
characters. In English I suppose you could capitalize the word to make clear
that you're borrowing from the German, but then you could just as well write
lard. I suppose if you want to emphasize that you're borrowing from the
Yiddish you might write ``shmaltz,'' but that spelling is much less common.
The shm and shn consonant clusters are common in German languages but rare in
English words not recently borrowed from German or Yiddish, so I guess it's
hard to naturalize the spelling.

Goose fat makes a good breadspread, but tastes depend on early childhood
experience. I remember the first time someone suggested dipping good bread in
an icky pool of green olive oil. Ah, but I was so much older then; I'm younger
than that now. Cf. skwarka.

schmaltz

The much more common sense of schmaltz in English is a transferred
sense from Yiddish: (often showy) sentiment, sentimentality. Most commonly
predicated of popular music or maybe art, in a condescending way or in a
sympathetic, nostalgic way.

The word has taken English inflections: schmaltzy, schmaltziness. That doesn't
always happen with Yiddish words in English (contrast the noun meshuga,
with adjective form meshugene). It's interesting how the transferred
sense of schmaltzy compares with that of the
materially almost equivalent greasy. They have similar connotation --
both are at least vaguely deprecatory, but different denotation.

Schmidt immer mit

This is a epithet that my mother remembers as having been common during her
childhood in Breslau in the 1930's, but web
searches suggest that it may have had only a local vogue.

This is an epithet in the manner of Johnny come lately, nervous Nelly,
silly Billy, and simple Simon. A fair literal translation might be `Smith
Always Along.' A reasonable English version might be `Tag-Along Smith,'
although it carries slightly different connotations. At minimum, unlike the
German ``immer mit,'' ``tag-along'' in English carries a suggestion of
someone who follows a group.

The English epithet examples suggest that alliteration or rhyme contribute to
their popularity. In case there's any doubt, therefore, I'll note that
-midt is pronounced identically with mit. Generally speaking,
final stop consonants are unvoiced, and final dt, tt, and t are equivalent.
Indeed, the words statt and Stadt originally had the same
spelling, and one of them (I forget which) had its spelling altered just to
make an orthographic distinction.

In the literal translation above, I Englished mit as `along.' As
English speakers generally know, mit is the German preposition typically
corresponding to the English preposition `with.' However, in the head term
mit is used as an adverb, and English with is rarely an adverb.
Along is a fair translation of the adverb mit, and it works
reasonably well for the translation of verbs with the separable prefix
mit into verb-plus-particle constructions: mitbringen is `to
bring along,' mitkommen is `to come along,' etc. For another contrast
between mit and with, see ablative of association.

Just to be a little pedantic, I'll note that along used as an English
preposition does not correpond at all well to the preposition mit. A
better way to go is with the postposition entlang, which happens to be
the closest cognate of along.

schnorr

Beg with chutzpah. From the Yiddish word
shnorrn, `to beg.' In English usage, of course, one applies English
inflections, typically -- as in this case -- to the root of the verb: I, we,
you, they schnorr; he, she schorrs; schnorred; schnorring. Our main entry for
the various related words is schnorrer.

schnorren

A German verb generally meaning `beg' in what we might call a
nonprofessional or occasional way. A more precise translation of its current
sense would be to `sponge' or `cadge' -- to wheedle small change or items like
cigarettes, but never to reciprocate. The person who does this (the sponge) is
a Schnorrer. Schnorren is part of Umgangsprache (that is
to say, it's a widespread colloquialism) continuing one sense of the Middle
High German verb schnurren.

The cognate Yiddish words, with slightly different senses than the German,
appeared in English early in the twentieth century (see
schnorrer). The German may have had some
influence on the English spelling.

schnorrer

A slang word meaning something like smart-aleck beggar, or a beggar with
chutzpah. The word is recorded as a Yiddishism
(a word used ``among the Jews'') in the 1913 Webster's Dictionary, and has
probably been more widely used in American English than the corresponding verbs
(see schnorr).

There is a defining story that gives the precise sense of schnorrer. To
have the full flavor, you should know that
megillah is Yiddish for `overlong
story' and tsuris is an uncountable noun meaning `troubles, problems,
worries.'

A schnorrer sees one of his regular contributors, and comes up to buttonhole
him for some spare change. The touch replies with a megillah about his
own tsuris. He's going through a rough patch, so he can't help right
now. The schnorrer complains in reply: ``Just because you've got
tsuris, why should I suffer?''

Well, at least we've broken ground on this entry. Schnorrer is probably
related, either as a cognate or parallel development, to English snore,
so we've got a bit more to describe.

A metal and semiconductor junction in which the semiconductor is weakly
doped.
For most metals on silicon, the Fermi energy in the
metal is pinned about 0.8 eV below the Si conduction band. The reasons are
still in some dispute. Cf. ohmic contact; vide
metal-semiconductor interfaces.

Schrödinger

Ernst Schrödinger.

Schulkrieg

German, `School war.' Term used in the last decade or so of the
nineteenth century for a major row in the education establishments of the
German-speaking world. Even Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany got involved. It was a sort of later battle of
ancients and moderns, but it was more concerned with science than art. At the
beginning of that period, the curriculum in Gymnasium (approx. ages ten to
eighteen) was dominated by instruction in the classical languages
(Greek and Latin).
Reformers sought to refocus the curriculum on mathematics, science, and modern
languages.

One of the major agitators for reform was the physicist/philosopher Ernst Mach.
Out of kindness, perhaps, writers fail to mention that Mach's early encounter
with the classical languages was traumatic. Like many children of the affluent
in that time, he was home-schooled until he was ready to enter Gymnasium at age
ten. He was very unhappy, particularly with the classical languages and also
the religious instruction. Perhaps he suffered a nervous breakdown. He was
withdrawn from Gymnasium and home-schooled for another five years, also doing a
part-time apprenticeship. It was probably a much better education for a
scientist than he would have gotten had he been kept in. He reentered the
formal track (i.e., Gymnasium) at age fifteen. It's interesting to
contrast the reactions of Mach and Ernst
Schrödinger to the classical grammars. Mach was repelled by the
memorization necessitated by the irregularity and by the semantically arbitrary
distinctions of declension, etc. Schrödinger was impressed by the logic
of the system.

A good place to read about Mach and Schrödinger is the wonderful
Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Your library must have it. A good
starting point to learn about the Schulkrieg is The Young Einstein - The
advent of relativity, by Lewis Pyenson (Bristol and Boston: Adam Hilger,
Ltd., 1985), pp. 1-3 (with extensive notes to the secondary literature).
The reformers largely won the Schulkrieg, but the form of this success did not
initially consist in a general change of curriculum, but rather in a change of
status of different kinds of existing schools.

Existing high schools in the period fell into three categories.
Gymnasien (that's plural of Gymnasium) were classical schools
that taught Greek and Latin. Realgymnasien -- semiclassical schools --
taught Latin but not Greek, and Oberrealschulen -- nonclassical schools
-- taught neither Latin nor Greek. Originally, only Gymnasium graduates
could enter university and certain government positions. The other kinds of
schools offered what one might think of as a nonacademic terminal diploma, or
vo-tech training. A large part of the reform
was the opening up of university education and higher government positions to
graduates of all Gymnasien. The curricula changed more slowly. My
cousin Franz, one of the older children to get out of
Germany on the Kindertransport (and one of
the last; his bus raced the back roads into Holland on the day Germany invaded
Poland) had gone to a regular Gymnasium. The only languages he knew
were German, Latin, and Greek. It was not unusual for Gymnasium graduates in
those days to take a year off and travel Europe, learning a modern language or
two and maturing. (That was before the war.)

Schwarze Haus

`Black House.' The German name of a famous old (1577) building in Lemberg
(now Lviv), decorated with limestone carvings, that
managed to survive both World Wars. Our central entry for buildings named for
colors is colored houses.

Scripta Classica
Israelica. Yearbook of the Israel Society for the Promotion of
Classical Studies (ISPCS). Founded in 1974, it
``has been devoted to the study of Classics and Ancient History. It welcomes
articles in English, French, German, Italian or Latin on any aspect of the
classical world.'' The journal catalogued by
TOCS-IN.

SCI

Spinal Cord Injury.

SCI

System Control Interrupt. A system interrupt used by hardware to notify
the OS of ACPI events.
Contrasted with SMI.

SCIA

Spinal Cord Injuries
Australia. ``Spinal Cord Injuries Australia was formed as the Australian
Quadriplegic Association in September 1967 to provide suitable accommodation
for young people with severe spinal cord injuries. Our services have expanded
as the need and opportunity arose. We now extend our services to all people
with physical disabilities.'' SCI's logo, as opposed to the abbreviated
form of its name, is sci, with the i segmented to suggest vertebrae.

The name SCIA suggests sciatica, which is a pain down the leg caused by
irritation of the sciatic nerve (the main nerve into the leg). The irritation
is typically spinal, occurring where the nerve emerges from the lumbar
vertebrae. After spending weeks on my back trying to decide whether to phrase
the preceding sentences in the singular or plural, I've concluded that hey, did
you know that Hebrew and Arabic have three grammatical numbers -- singular,
dual, and plural? I think it's used more systematically in Arabic; in Hebrew
it tends to be used only for things that are naturally paired, like, uh, legs.
One leg is regel, a pair of legs is raglayim, more
is regalim (stressed syllables bold). As noted at this LE entry, that's not exactly `leg.'

You recognize the Hebrew word regel (`foot, leg, lower extremity')
because you remember the star named Rigel. That star marks the left foot of
Orion. (He faces us, so that's on our right
in the northern hemisphere. If you cross over into the southern hemisphere,
the same thing happens that happened to Dante and his guide Virgilio at the end
of the Inferno. No, not ``Towering Inferno''; this Inferno is deep.)
The name is short for the Arabic rigl al-gauza, `foot of the central
one.' (The definite article al in a compound like this means `of the'.)
Rigel Kentaurus, the third-brightest star in the sky, is the foot of the
constellation Centaurus. It is designated
Alpha 1 Centauri, the alpha indicating that it is the brightest
star of its constellation. The 1 is to distinguish it from two much dimmer
stars that occupy what looks to the naked (earthbound) eye as a single
(twinkling) bright point. Rigel (in Orion) is also close (9'' -- nine seconds
of arc, not nine inches, you clown) to a dim
companion, but apparently that's not quite enough to merit the 1 treatment.

Rigel is the seventh-brightest star in the sky (in apparent magnitude, of
course), and the brightest in Orion. Bayer designated it Beta Orionis
(implying the second-brightest of Orion) by mistake. Alpha Orionis is a
variable star, so I guess it got named, or at least observed, on a good day.
Alpha Orionis is better known as Betelgeuse. The latter star
name, and you have my permission not to believe this, is a corruption of the
Arabic yad al-gauza (yad, in Hebrew and Arabic, means `hand').

Old English and other Germanic languages also had a dual, most evident in the
personal pronouns. With the exception of, I think, Icelandic (with dual and
plural forms of we), modern Germanic languages do not preserve the distinction.

I'm not going to try to define scientific instruments with any degree of
precision. I just want to mention the existence of the
Websters'
Instrument Makers' Database, available online. Incidentally, we have an
entry for the RSI.

scientoid

A bulky object in solar orbit at about one a.u.
A scientoid resembles a scientist in having had a scientific education and in
being involved with science. Unlike a scientist, however, a scientoid does not
contribute to progress in science. Instead, it becomes involved in national
and international committees dedicated to naming and renaming physical objects
and measuring units that do not need naming or renaming. The word
scientoid is modeled on and inspired by
plutoid.

sci-fi

Science Fiction. The earliest instance of the term science fiction
found in the Oxford English Dictionary is in Little Earnest Book upon
Great Old Subject, written by W. Wilson and published in 1851. Since
then some science fiction has turned into fact. This was apparently an
isolated instance, however.

The term really entered the lexicon in June 1929, with Hugo Gernsback,
editor of Science Wonder Stories, who sponsored a monthly $50
contest for essays on ``What Science Fiction Means to Me.''

I think the magazine later became Amazing Stories. Hugo Gernsback
also operated the radio station WRNY.

The term sci-fi, oddly enough, is used to describe a broader genre than
science fiction proper, as once conceived. In contrast, SF, though in
principle more ambiguous (as it fits science fantasy) has a more
restrictive sense (see further discussion at SF).

scil.

Abbreviation for Latinscilicet, in turn
a contraction of scire licet. Its meaning, of course, is `of course' or
`evidently,' and evidently it introduces a writer's gloss on a report or quote.
[E.g., ``Vladimir said he (scil. Pogio) could stick it where the
sun don't shine.'']

Something between a dilettante and a poseur. Why does French have all the good words for this? A sciolist
is someone with superficial knowledge who claims to be an expert. The word may
be almost obsolete, but the concept is not. Use this word. Pronounce the
first three letters as in science. Express opprobrium with brutality
and joy. Here's a model to follow from
Generation of Vipers, an
almost recent book (p. 241):

These tousled wearers of the flat hat [the author refers only to professors],
supererogated by the medieval magic of the
cloister, and made additionally colossal by a little knowledge of some external
or measurable facet of the universe, have failed wretchedly in their assignment
of educating post-school Americans. They have so departmentalized knowledge
that a quadrennium is not long enough to make a sciolist, and they have let the
teaching of wisdom disappear altogether from the curriculum, because doubtless,
they no longer have any to teach.

(Did he check the 500-level courses?)

scion

A very well-known word meaning descendant or heir. Rhymes with
lion. In sylvanculture, it also means a detached shoot or twig
containing buds, used in grafting.

Scion

An offshoot of Toyota, detached in advertising, rolled out in Summer 2004
with lower-priced models and styling to tap the youth market (generation Y, in
case you're keeping score). The provocatively unaerodynamic and somewhat
clownishly unstreamlined styling owes a very little to lowriders and a lot to
phat pants, or maybe to the successful Honda Element. The name is pronounced
as two equally stressed syllables, like the elementary particle psion or
``sigh on,'' rhyming with ``lie on.''

SaCK. In high-school and college football in the US, sacks are counted
against rushing yardage. (That is, yardage lost on a play that ends in a sack
of the quarterback is counted against rushing yardage
for the quarterback and the team, just as yardage lost in a running play is
counted against yardage by the runner and team.) In the
NFL, sacks count against passing yardage.

Senior Classical League. At first I thought this was a joke. Maybe it
is, but they have a website. Organizations
should perform the functions that one would expect from their names.
Therefore, the SCL should start running package tours for retirees who want
to wander around the Roman forum and say Salvete! to the cats.

Also known as the NSCL. More information, and a raison d'être, at the
JCL entry.

Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
``SCO is the world's leading provider of system software for Business
Critical Servers that run the critical day-to-day business operations of
large and small organizations, and the leading provider of software that
integrates Microsoft® Windows® PCs and other clients with all
major Unix® System servers.'' Their online support is called ``SOS.''

SpaceCraft Office. NASAnese misnomer for an
earthbound office concerned with spacecraft. The SCO construction should be
parallel to SO/HO. How will they solve the
inkwell and paperweight problems in a zero-gravity environment? What will keep
white-out in the bottle? Which way will the hanging folders hang? When you
press down on the desktop stapler with one hand and you're holding a Tang in
the other hand, how do you keep from spinning or
sailing across the room from the reaction force? Let's meet at Starbucks.
What good is an ``overnight delivery guarantee'' when there are so many
different day lengths? Is it okay if I telecommute this month?

SCOLT

Southern Conference On
Language Teaching. ``Organized in 1965, the Southern Conference on
Language Teaching is one of five regional affiliates of the American Council on
the Teaching of Foreign Languages [ACTFL].
Thirteen states are in the SCOLT region: Florida, Georgia, South Carolina,
North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee,
Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and
Texas. Some of these states, because of their
[geographic] proximity to other regional organizations, are `shared'
with the Northeast Conference, the Central States Conference, or
the Southwest Conference.''

A town in the Poconos (northeastern Pennsylvania),
accessible from I-80. I just want to say that
every time I drive between northern Indiana and northern
New Jersey, I see signs for this place, and in the
distance the name suggests a different word. It's not even funny any more.
It's not a very important town, and the people who need to get there should
know the exit. Is it really necessary for just every town near the interstate
to be named in prominent signage?

I was going to wait until I had a minim entry to mention this, but I decided
that making my opinions known was simply too urgent. Okay, now we have a minim entry so you can be enlightened.

Scotus

John Duns Scotus, of course. The celebrated medieval schoolman also known
by the epithet Doctor Subtilis (`subtle doctor'). The term dunce
was coined to describe his epigoni.

The etymology of this is suggested to be lobscouse, a mariner's
stew, but no one knows the etymology of that. (Specifically, lob is an
old word meaning boil, but no one knows the origin of scouse. I wonder
if it mightn't be an unattested variant of souse.) As long as you've
got all day to ponder stuff like this, you could do worse than browse the
house entry.

SCP

Secondary Communications Processor.

SCP

Serial Clock Pulse.

SCP

(Telephone) Service Control Point.

SCP

Signal Control Point. A signal control point is a database containing
information used for advanced call-processing functions in a Signaling
System 7 (SS-7) network.

Society of
Christian Philosophers. ``[O]rganized
in 1978 to promote fellowship among Christian Philosophers and to stimulate
study and discussion of issues which arise from their Christian and
philosophical commitments.'' And here I was thinking it was intended to
stimulate study of issues arising from other peoples' Christian and
philosophical commitments. I mean, surely serious scholars want to get a
critical purchase on the matter, no? ``One of [the SCP's] chief aims is to go
beyond the usual philosophy of religion sessions at the American Philosophical
Association [APA] and to stimulate
thinking about the nature and role of Christian commitment in philosophy. The
Society is open to anyone interested in philosophy who considers himself or
herself a Christian. Membership is not restricted to any particular `school'
of philosophy or to any branch of Christianity, or to professional
philosophers.''

Silicon-Controlled Rectifier. A pnpn device that functions as a gated
diode. The gate functions something like a trigger: with bias across an
SCR that is off, the gate turns the SCR on; with a current flowing through
the SCR, it's hard to turn the device off by adjusting the bias on the gate;
the SCR goes open, regardless of gate voltage, when the current drops to
zero.

According to The Quotable
Musician, Duke (raw value 9 points) Ellington said (p. 125 of cited
collection) the following about Scrabble®:

Playing ``Bop'' is like scrabble with all the vowels missing.

Scrabble examining table

The logophile hypochondriac's delight. Except as otherwise indicated, in
this glossary anything said to be found on the ``Scrabble examining table''
(such as diseases, morbidities, infections, foreign objects, conditions,
syndromes, diagnoses, prophylactics, treatments, miracle cures and quackery,
and forms of insurance) are accepted by
all three major Scrabble®
dictionaries.

Scrabble forest

A place with specimens from many lands. Except as otherwise indicated, in
this glossary all trees and shrubs said to be part of the ``Scrabble forest'' are trees and shrubs
whose names (as well as any plurals) as given are accepted by
all three major Scrabble®
dictionaries. Ditto woody objects or anything else in there.

Scrabble tablelands

A region of remarkable biodiversity, considering that it occupies an area
of only 225 square tiles. (Okay, oblong tiles.) It may be above the tree
line, but herbs and small shrubs are found there, as well as tropical,
subtropical, temperate-zone, subarctic, arctic, and probably extraterrestrial
plants. Also deep-sea fish, and anything else listed in
all three major Scrabble®
dictionaries (except trees; they go only in the
Scrabble forest).

Safety Control-Rod Ax-Man, not. The debunking text that follows is from an
article by David Baurac in ``logos -- A magazine about
research at Argonne National Laboratory'' (ANL).
The article reports
anecdotes told at the ``Symposium Celebrating the 100th Birthday of Enrico
Fermi and His Contribution to the Development of Nuclear Power.'' (The SBF
Glossary Content Advisory Commission has recommended not describing this
symposium at all.)

All over the world, reactor control panels have emergency shutdown buttons
labeled "SCRAM." One often-heard story holds that the term is an
acronym for Safety Control Rod Ax Man, an homage to Norman Hilberry, Argonne's
second director, who stood poised with an ax during the start-up of the first
reactor, ready to cut a rope and release the control rods that would stop the
reaction should all else fail. But during the break after the symposium's
first panel, [Volny] Wilson laid this myth to rest.

He said that he and Wilcox Overbeck were working in the squash court [at the
University of Chicago's Stagg Field] where the
reactor was under construction while an electrician wired the control panels.
The electrician finished wiring the red emergency-shutdown button, turned to
them, and asked how he should label it.

According to Wilson, Overbeck responded by asking, "Well, what do you do
when you push the button?"

South Central
Review. ISSN: 0743-6831. It's the
official journal of the SCMLA, and continues the
The South Central Bulletin, which was published from 1940 to 1983, one
volume per year. That started out modestly, with anywhere from 4 to 20 pages
per number and one, two, three, or four numbers per volume (i.e., per
year). In its current incarnation as SCRev, it publishes on the order of a
hundred pages per issue, with three or four issues per year. (I think that in
principle it's a quarterly, with Spring-Summer (number one), Summer-Fall,
Fall-Winter, and Winter-Spring (number four) issues, but often a couple of
issues are combined.

There seems to be a little terminological confusion about this, though if
you reached this entry from either of the adjacent ones you're probably okay.
If you're still confused, go to the blog entry and
scroll down about four paragraphs to the relevant information.

scroll up!

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
| | | | | | |
| | | | | | |

scrood

You mean screwed: a twisted application of the principle of the
inclined plane or wedge. See the NC entry.

South Central Seminar in the History of Early Modern Philosophy. The title
often used to be shortened by omission of ``the History of.'' I'd have guessed
that would be a critical omission, but I guess I'd have guessed wrong.
The personal homepage of Stephen
H. Daniel, a professor of philosophy at Texas
A&ampM, seems to be the closest that this regular conference has to a
permanent home on the net. (Scroll down there to the pictures of philosophers
other than George Berkeley.) Some recent meetings:

Syrian Computer Society. Offers free computer courses. The fact that
Bashar al-Assad was president of this modern organization proves that the
new dictator of Syria is a liberal good guy, unlike his dynastic predecessor,
the bloodthirsty Hafez al-Assad. Immediately the secret police and informer
networks will be dismantled, and shortly after freedom of speech, assembly,
religion and travel are implemented, there will be free and fair elections,
an independent judiciary, military withdrawal from the colony of Lebanon, a
forthright investigation into the unfortunate disappearance of the entire
population of Hama in 1982, etc. Indeed, since I wrote this in June 2000,
much of this has probably already occurred by the time you read it here. It
was in anticipation of these changes that Assad family retainers and the
Alawite-dominated military rallied round the promising young ophthalmologist,
lowering the constitutional minimum age for dictator to his current age. They
all chafed under the previous system that made them rich and gave them criminal
impunity, and look forward to the accountability and loss of power that
democracy will bring them.

The fastest scuzzy interfaces are have always been faster than the
contemporaneous fastest interfaces standard for PC hard drives, but those
SCSI drives are typically not yet available for PC's. In any case, the
speed difference has been shrinking. The one reason to get SCSI for a PC
right now is if you need to access a large number of disks simultaneously.

SCSI 11

Also known as Honda connectors. Yeah, they're really used in cars.
That's all I know.

SCSPP

Southern Center for Studies in Public
Policy. Founded at Clark College in 1968. In 1988, Atlanta University and
Clark College consolidated to form Clark Atlanta University
(CAU), the current institutional home of the SCSPP.
The SCSPP publishes Status of Black Atlanta (SBA) and Georgia Legislative Review (GLR). See also SCSPP's sister institution DBI.

Self Contained Underwater
Breathing Apparatus. A lightweight alternative to the heavy, bulky,
difficult-to-use diving bells and suits previously available, scuba gear was
invented by Jacques-Yves Cousteau with the help of
various more technically proficient collaborators. Perhaps that's not the best
word... JYC was an artillery instructor for the French Navy during WWII. He tested his invention secretly off the coast
of Vichy France, with his wife Simone swimming on the surface above, and
look-outs on shore. The English-language acronym scuba is apparently
the universal international term, but those who want to stick to
French can use the words scaphandre
(`diving suit') and subaquatique.

Scuba is a great way to meet fish and slimey invertebrates, as you may see.

(Argentina's) Secretaía de Cultura yComunicación.
(La Presidencia, the executive branch of the government of the Argentine
republic, has two kinds of cabinet-level agencies: ministries, which are like
cabinet-level departments in the US, and secretariats, which are like
autonomous agencies with more specific tasks.)

The SCYC, whose expired existence is still atested on the web pages of some of
its former subagencies, is now simply the Secretaía de Cultura.
Well, you know, in the latest economic nightmare, there've been cutbacks all
around. We've all had to tighten our belts and -- what? Now there's also a
Secretaría de Medios de Comunicacón? Do I detect here
the germ of the problem that besets the nation?

Within the SCYC there were, and within the Secretariat of Culture there are

International Solar Concentrator Conference for the Generation of
Electricity or Hydrogen.

S.D.

Salutem Dicit. Latin which means (in a
``dynamic'' rather than literal translation), `sends greetings.' The word
salus means `health, welfare, safety,' and occurred in various
expressions of good wishes on meeting (and also on parting). It became
associated with greeting, hence the verb salutare (`to greet') and the
nouns salutatio (`greeting') and salutator (`visitor').

The phrase salutem dicit became sufficiently standard that the
abbreviation S.D. was used formulaically at the beginnings of letters (in the
preserved letters of Cicero and Pliny, for example). Here salus
occurs in the accusative form salutem, indicating that it is the direct
object of the verb dicit (meaning `says' in this instance). So you can
think of salutem dicit as meaning ``says `[good] health' '' or
``says hi.'' Sometimes S.D. was shortened to S., and the word ``dicit'' was
understood. I suppose one could imagine that S. stood for the verb
salutat (`greets'), but apparently S.D. was sufficiently standard that
S. was regarded as a shortened form of it.

One instance in a modern language, of a similar verb that may be elided and
understood, is sprechen (`speak'). In the phrase ich kann Deutsch
sprechen (`I can speak German') is colloquially truncated to ich kann
Deutsch (`I can German'). This pattern occurs in a few other expressions,
such as ich will ins Kino [gehen] (`I want [to go] to the movie
theater'), but which elisions are conventional and which weird is something
you'll have to ask a native speaker (or maybe google) about.

Today this S.D. (or S.) occurs primarily in college diplomas, if there.
The form S.P.D. also occurs: Salutem
Plurimam Dicit. This is normally translated `sends many greetings.' This
is a good place to point out that salutem is a singular form, and is
treated a mass (a/k/a uncountable) noun; plurimus means `much' in this
context.

Shine-Dalgarno. A specific recognition sequence in messenger RNA (mRNA), five to ten bases long, which does not
code for protein but which aligns with a
complementary Anti-Shine-Dalgarno site on ribosomal RNA to align the start
codon on the mRNA with a p-site on the ribosome.

SD

Social Drinker. Personals ad abbreviation, as in ``SWM NS SD. Likes
romantic walks on the beach.'' I am willing to confess here that I've
read singles ads for many years. Reportedly, I've even replied to one or two.
I make this personal revelation so that you can appreciate the significance
when I tell you that I have never seen a personals ad with a self description
of ``heavy drinker.'' It does not happen. Some people have claimed that they
could have guessed this fact independently, but there's no substitute for
empirical study.

Soldiers' Dependents' Allowance[s]. British and Irish official term dating
from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, in instances I've seen.
Not infrequently given with dependants misspelling. The
abbreviation was at least used during WWII.
Cf.SDA.

Society for Developmental Biology.
``The purpose of the Society for Developmental Biology is to further the study
of development in all organisms and at all levels, to represent and promote
communication among students of development, and to promote the field of
developmental biology.''

SDB's official publication is Developmental Biology
(online access free to SDB
members). Their website provides links to Current Topics in
Developmental Biology (CTDB), but that seems to be an independent journal
owned by the publisher (Elsevier).

An SDB member in the news in late 2008 was Prof. Martin Chalfie of the Columbia
University Department of Biological Sciences. He shared that year's Nobel
Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura (of the Marine
Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole) and Roger Y. Tsien of
(UCSD) for the discovery and development of
green fluorescent protein (GFP). That's a
camera-friendly Nobel if there ever was one.

SDCA

SD, CA. I.e., San Diego, California. I had to chase down twelve
other SDCA's before I figured this out.

South Dakota Chiropractors'
Association. There's a great image on the home page. You can see the back
of the head and torso of a guy lying in the top of a stocks, and a guy in a
white lab coat is giving him a funny massage. A halo of white ripples emanates
from the place where the man in white is pressing. In the background, a young
woman in a long skirt holds a manila folder and grins at the scene.

``[A] partnership of associations representing professional counselors who
enhance human development by providing benefits, products, and services to
expand professional knowledge and expertise; to promote recognition of
counselors to the public and media; and to represent member's interests before
federal, state, and local government. SDCA represents nearly 550 professional
counselors in the counseling profession and related fields of interest.''

SDCA

``Standardize, Do, Check, Action.'' The anal-retentive ``refinement'' of
PDCA. Don't they teach parts of speech any more?
Time to get back to basics; start at the Deming
wheel.

SDCA

The State Data Center on Aging. A unit within the Florida Policy
Exchange Center on Aging (FPECA).

Inside the ticket booth, she gives me a precociously hard stare and
answers immediately: ``SONY Dynamic Digital Sound.'' Her chewing gum
resumes its cyclic deformations -- a chaotic mixing behavior. Our
communication is over. I do not ask for an explication of `dynamic.'

Self-Defense Forces. The Japanese Military.
(The army is Japan's GSDF.)
Under the constitution imposed by George MacArthur, Japan maintains military
forces explicitly for self-defense only.

In the post-WWII era, a majority of Japanese have
adopted some kind of pacifist position. Like Germany, Japan has been reluctant
to become involved in military action beyond its own borders. On the other
hand there is also a powerful minority in Japan that wants to see the standing
of Japan's military rehabilitated.

In 2001, Junichiro Koizumi almost single-handedly saved the fortunes of his LDP by campaigning on a promise to clean up corruption
and secrecy in government. Once elected, he reneged as quickly as possible and
negotiated (with LDP party factions) his own survival as PM. An interesting aspect of his political
maneuvering after the election was the number of big symbolic crumbs he threw
to the factions one would call militarist, if the word were not too strong for
the time being.

In the aftermath of its Iraq conquest in 2003, the US urged Japan to contribute
personnel to the reconstruction effort. SDF personnel are being deployed in
non-combat capacities. This got done partly on the basis of arguments that the
reconstruction effort is not a combat situation. A small 1000-person advance
team of the GSDF left for Iraq on January 19, 2004. In a joint appearance on a
Fuji TV show the day before their departure, the secretaries general of the LDP
and New Komeito (their coalition partner) announced that the SDF mission would
not be abandoned if Japanese troops are injured or even killed by terrorists
there. Really! What commitment! The special reasoning required for this
conclusion was explained by New Komeito's Sec.-Gen. Tetsuzo Fuyushiba:
``Terrorist attacks are not recognized as an act of combat'' (Japan
Today translation).

Selectively Doped Heterostructure Transistor. Yet another name for a
HEMT. I suppose that use of this acronym, like
use of any of the others, tells something about your country of origin,
but I don't know what.

Single-Document Interface. (MS Windows
term.) Distinguished not only from MDI but also
from the simpler dialog-box interface.

SDI

Strategic Defence Institute.

SDI

Strategic Defense Initiative. Derided as ``Star Wars.'' Long-time USSR ambassador to the US Anatoly Dobrynin published
his memoirs in 1995, and gave some grudging credit there to SDI, and more
generally to Ronald Reagan's personality, as having contributed to the fall of
the Soviet Union.
(He argues, however, as most analysts now seem to do, that the fall of the
Soviet Union was a historical inevitability, fore-ordained by the
idealistic rigidity of the Communist leadership. I would not deny this,
but if I could have perceived the imminent manifestation of the historical
inevitability in 1988, I could have made my fortune in bets. Death is a
historical inevitability generally. What is in question is the timing.)

Social Democratic and Labor Party. Until the elections of November 2003,
this was the largest nationalist political
party, and the second-largest political party, in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Sinn Fein had 18 seats.
In December 1998, SDLP leader John Hume was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
jointly with UUP leader (and Northern Ireland
First Minister) David Trimble. Not surprisingly, in the next Assembly
elections, his party switched places with its main nationalist political
opposition. Following the Nov. 26 elections, Sinn Fein has 24 seats and is
the largest nationalist party (third-largest overall) in the Assembly; SDLP
has 18 seats. What is Sinn Féin? Well, if you know where to put
the accent, I imagine you already have a pretty
good idea. But see the IRA entry.

Social Development Service. Singapore's government-run match-making
service. They're on the internet too, now. Censored, of course.

SDS

Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate. An ionic surfactant. It can modify the rate and
phase of crystal growth nucleated by a surface, for an example, but its most
common application is as a detergent, under the name of sodium lauryl sulfate (q.v.),
which I suppose sounds less `chemical.' Another application is SDS-PAGE.

SDS

Striped Domain Structure.

SDS

Students for a Democratic Society. Founded at the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor.

Student Developmental Task Inventory-II. Created (apparently) by Roger B.
Winston, Jr., Ted K. Miller, and J.S. Prince (1977). An improvement on their
SDTI and obsoleted by their
SDTLI, which was in turn superseded by their
SDTLA. I guess this must be progress.

SDTLA

Student Developmental Task and
Lifestyle Assessment. ``It represents
a sample of behavior and reports about feelings and attitudes that are
indicative of students who have satisfactorily achieved certain developmental
tasks common to young adult college students between the ages of 17 and 24
[sometimes the range is stated as between 17 and 25].''
You might as well be warned that they describe the test in high-flown
abstractions and in terms of its formal structure, so don't expect to have any
idea of what the test is like. Oh wait -- ``The assessment procedure is based
on concepts and principles of human development [ah -- as opposed to assessment
tools that are based on eating cheese],
specifically that of developmental task achievement that typically occurs
within the college setting.'' I'm waiting to find out if developmental task
achievement is a concept or a principle. I'll be sure to get back to this!

The product was authored by Roger B. Winston, Jr., Ted K. Miller, and Diane L.
Cooper (1999). These individuals appear to constitute ``Student Development
Associates, Inc.'' (SDA). In fact, R.B.W. is president of SDA.

The SDTLA is a revision of the Student Developmental Task and Lifestyle
Inventory (SDTLI) ``is grounded in the theoretical
approach described by Chickering and Reisser (1993) in Education and
Identity (2nd ed.).'' I hope that this theoretical approach is not
overthrown in ``(3rd ed.).''

According to the authors, the ``SDTLI [developed in part by R.B.W. and T.K.M.]
has been useful in working with students individually, for assessing student
needs in program development, for teaching in orientation courses, and for
conducting outcomes assessments. We believe that the SDTLA is an even better
assessment instrument.''

Selenium is the active ingredient in nonprescription dandruff
shampoos/treatments like Selsun Blue, as well as prescription treatments
that often simply have a higher concentration of selenium. Coal-tar
derivatives are also used, but they smell. (When you think about it, you
see that they more-or-less must smell: coal tar ``derivatives'' are obtained
by fractional distillation with no chemical processing, and coal-tar has
a vast collection of different compounds, many of them odoriferous. A
process as unselective as distillation is unlikely to separate useful and
non-smelly compounds from smelly ones.) Bishop Berkeley, the empiricist
philosopher and enthusiast of education and new-world settlement, had a
pet theory that most of the problems of Ireland could be solved if everyone
(everyone in Ireland, not England) would bathe in tar-water. It might have
done for the dandruff and lice, anyway.

SE

Secondary Electron. An electron emitted by ionization of a bulk or surface
atom when a high-energy electron beam impinges a surface. Distinguished, by
its low energy relative to the ionizing electrons in the primary beam, from the
back-scattered electron.

SE

Sheet Extrusion.

SE

The Society for
Ethics. ``Established in 1995, [it] serves the purpose of promoting
philosophical research in ethics, broadly construed, including areas such as
(but not limited to) ethical theory, moral, social and political philosophy, as
well as areas of applied ethics such as (but not limited to) legal, business
and medical ethics. Although the SE is primarily a philosophical society,
others are also encouraged to become members.

You know, if you take the sentences on the homepage of the SSS (``established in 2000'') and just scramble the
sentence order and paragraph divisions, and change all the details, you get
something that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the SE page. Somebody
really ought to look into this. Is this right?

``Although the SE is primarily a philosophical society,
others are also encouraged to become members.''

[I emailed the guy with that .sig ("Oh, _that_
Sweden!"), and he wrote back that for some newsgroup readers, the
last bit constitutes new information. This exchange took place in the early
1990's, before Sweden joined the EU (see EU-15
entry). Today, he might write ``Sweden, EU,'' and it
would provide geopolitical rather than political-geographical information.
See alsothis
CA.]

The Prologue (``In the Beginning Was the Moraine'') of Leading by Design:
The IKEA Story (described at the IKEA entry)
begins

Älmhult, Småland, Sweden, the World.

(It only gets sillier after that.)

Sweden has the reputation of having the highest suicide rates in Europe. It's
probably the lack of sunlight. (It's SAD, don't you
agree?) The Swedish-born founder of IKEA comes from a family of mean
mothers-in-law and their suicidal sons, yet
those're on the German-immigrant side of the family.

SE

Switching Element.

SE

Systems Engineer[ing].

.sea

Computer filename extension indicating a Self-Extracting Archive.

SEA

Southeast Evaluation
Association. ``Formed in 1986, SEA is a regional affiliate of the American
Evaluation Association. Its annual conference
attracts
participants from the entire southeast region and internationally known
speakers. SEA members have varied
backgrounds in performance and program evaluation, teaching, policy
analysis, planning and measurement.''

Membership has its privileges. Primarily, it allows you to claim that you're
``at SEA.''

SEa Air Land. Pronounced like the name of the animal -- seal. Seals live
in the sea and eat fish. Oh -- you want to know what SEAL's do.

sealed acronym

An acronym that is no longer to be expanded. A typical situation is that
of an established professional organization whose original name has wording
that the organization prefers to downplay or suppress, but whose initialism or
acronym is a valuable brand. It may be that the organization has expanded
geographically, and wants, say, to soft-pedal a national reference now that it
has gone international. The organization may have expanded its bailiwick in
some other way. We may have a more detailed analysis at some later time, but
for now here are some examples of sealed acronyms mentioned (or eventually to
be mentioned, if there's no link) elsewhere in our glossary:
AACSB (temporarily sealed for repairs),
AAMCO,
AARP,
ACCELS,
ACCO,
ACT,
ACTR,
ACTR/ACCELS,
ADSC,
A&E,
Alco, Alcoa, Amoco, Amway, ARCO,
ARMA,
Biola,
BP,
CIB,
CBS,
CMP (sealed so tight I never pried it open),
Crisco,
CVS,
DBfK,
Enco, Esso,
HLN (possibly),
IBM,
ICSU,
JBL,
JDRF,
JHPIEGO,
KFC,
MAACO,
NAACP,
Nabisco,
NORA, Norelco,
NTM,
PHP,
QJM,
Reo,
NARAL,
Nasdaq,
NDN,
Socal, Socony, Sohio,
Spam,
SPIE,
SQL,
STS,
Sunoco, Texaco,
TD,
velcro, YIVO.
SBF is not an example yet.

It is very often the case that an organization that seals its acronym
(e.g., ADSC, ARMA, SPIE, and YIVO above) will adopt an official name
that includes a description in apposition to the old initialism. This is one
of the key signs that the acronym has been sealed or (see
AGI) is in the process of becoming sealed. This
is often ungainly, and is especially awkward in situations where abbreviations
are being introduced. For example, sometime in 2007 a feature article in
ADSC's glossy bimonthly had the following title and subtitle: ``Annual
Alliance Report: Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA) and ADSC: International Association of
Foundation Drilling (ADSC).'' This glossary
entry was inserted on or before August 14, 2007.

Another problem with sealed acronyms in appositional names may occur if the
original acronym expansion contained words, like ADSC's ``Association,'' that
were later added in apposition. (There's also the partial overlap of
the acronym's ``Drilled'' with the appositional phrase's ``Drilling.'') These
may be considered AAPP's -- Pleonasms with
Acronym Assistance pleonasms. However, this is a very dicey question,
particularly once the acronym is completely sealed. We have teams of
philosophers working around the clock to resolve this vital issue, and we
expect to receive a preliminary report within a couple of millennia. SPIE
(with overlaps in Society, Photo-optical/Optical, and Engineers/Engineering),
ARMA (Association and Managers/Management), and YIVO are on tenterhooks. [YIVO
is an extreme case if you're reading the Yiddish, where the description in
apposition is simply the original acronym expansion (details
at its entry). In English, the appositional
Institute echoes the Yiddish Institut -- represented by O in the
acronym.]

sealed initialism

A term that we here at SBF, after careful consideration, have decided to
deprecate. We are pleased to observe that already, following (or
perhaps even racing ahead of) our lead, no one uses this term. The preferred
term is sealed acronym (supra).
Acronyms are initialisms that are regarded as words. It is often difficult to
say whether an initialism is regarded as a word, because mind-reading is an
exacting task. However, when any initialism is sealed, its former expansion is
suppressed or avoided, and that is strong evidence of its worditude or
wordocity, as the case may be. Hence, the only use of the term ``sealed
initialism'' would be to describe an initialism that was not but is now an
acronym. Life is complicated enough.

(It might be objected that when an initialism is pronounced as a sequence of
letter names, it is less likely to be deemed an acronym. However, that could
only be a valid objection in a phonetic language.) If I wrote any more, I'd
start waxing philosophical about the past participle. No one wants to see that
happen.

seamless

There are a few song pairs played without break in very popular recorded
versions, and that are almost always played back-to-back on album radio. Some
I've noticed are

Jackson Browne's ``The Load Out'' and ``Stay''
(some people think it's one song ``Load Out and Stay'').

ZZ Top's ``Waitin' For The Bus'' and ``Jesus Left Chicago'' (the
first two tracks of the Tres Hombres album).

U2's ``An Cat Dubh'' and ``Into the Heart'' (third and fourth
tracks of the album Boy). I'm not sure how much air play these
have had, but they're pretty seamless on the album, and they're very
similar. The 1:58 ``Into the Heart'' could pass as a coda to the
preceding song (6:16), or as a second movement like the sung part of
Elton John's ``Funeral for a Friend.''

There's actually a silent moment in the Queen item, but it's a single track in
some of Queen's albums.

[It's hard to say precisely how complete the above list is, especially since
only a small fraction of songs from albums ever sold get much airplay, and the
above is based mostly on what I've noticed on the radio. (Of course, there's
some overlap with pairs I've noticed in my personal collection.) What I can
say is that I've returned to this entry at least half a dozen times to add a
pair that turned out to be on the list already. Not only does this prove that
I have absolutely no long-term memory, but it also suggests that the songs on
this list represent a solid majority of such pairs, weighted by airplay, at
least in the ``classic rock'' genre.]

I guess that if you're a DJ with the runs, you can
queue these along with American Pie.
They're also ready-made for Two-for-Tuesday.

I heard these described as medleys by more than
one DJ. (I've also heard a DJ stumble trying to describe the ZZ Top pair
listed above, evidently because he didn't know or couldn't think of an apt
term.) I suppose these song pairs fall within most loose definitions of the
word, but medley normally implies or suggests incomplete serial
performance of more than two songs. Part of the charm of nonindustrial medleys
is the art of the musicians in making a smooth transition. When the whole
songs form a medley this is less of a challenge, because the beginning and end
of a song needn't carry the same rhythm as the rest of the song.

There are some single songs, like Elton John's ``Funeral for a Friend'' and
one or two Pink Floyd tunes, that seem like two songs combined. Ike and Tina
Turner did a famous cover of ``Proud Mary,'' sung half ``nice... and easy'' and
half ``rough,'' which is discussed at the octane
number entry.

To help you find the foregoing entry, we include this search-engine
fodder:
two-fer 2-fer
I thought it was one song
but it was really two songs
only one song but it's two songs back to back together recorded live
I thought it was just one song
but it was actually two songs
no pause no silence no interlude album tracks like a single track
I thought it was a single song
but it was two songs
the first song flows into the second song
the first song flows into the next song
one song flows into the other song
when they play it on the radio
it sounds like a single song
but it's really two songs that sound
it sounds like just one song
but it's really two songs that
it sounds like one song
but it's really two songs
I thought they were one song
I thought they were just one song
I thought they were a single song

SouthEastern American Society for
Eighteenth-Century Studies. ``An interdisciplinary society promoting the
interchange of ideas and information on the culture, history, literature,
philosophy, politics, music, economics, architecture, art, medicine, and
science of the eighteenth-century world.'' An odd way to define
voyeurs.

Seat, SEAT

Sociedad Española de Automóviles de
Turismo. Founded in 1950 with Fiat assistance. As recently as 1972
or so, when we rented a SEAT in Portugal and Spain, SEAT was just a
FIAT manufactured in Spain, with some minor
cosmetic changes. Since 1990, it has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of
Volkswagen.

The English-language Wikipedia
entry for SEAT claims that the E is long (``SEE-at''). I don't recall ever
hearing it pronounced any other way than phonetically according to its spelling
in Spanish (hence short-e: ``SEH-at''). Perhaps the British pronunciation is
modeled on that of Fiat. (There probably isn't any distinct American English
pronunciation, since SEAT isn't marketed in North America.) The
Spanish-language Wikipedia
entry makes no particular comment on the pronunciation. It does, however,
explain the following:

SEAT currently names its models after Spanish cities. In order to avoid
possible trademark problems in the future, it has registered the names of all
the cities of Spain.

Sea-Tac

SEAttle-TAComa. Two cities and one airport in Washington State.

seatback

When your body's back is against your seat's back, your back is usually
about stationary. To the extent that it is moving in any direction, it is
moving slightly, slowly downward, as your body moves from a sitting into a
slouching posture. Consequently, the friction of the seatback tends to
pull your shirt out, and if you've got a coat or anything draped over the
seatback it tends to be pulled forward and down, in a motion that reminds
most people of subduction at a tectonic plate boundary. The significance
should be clear: you should take your coat or (especially) your light jacket
off before sitting, and drape it over the back of the chair so it
opens forward. If you sit down and then take your coat off in place, leaving
it inside out with the zipper or buttons or whatever facing back, the weight
of the coat acts parallel to the ``drag'' force exerted by your dorsal
anatomy, obliviating your outerwear into the dusty, navel-like crack between the seat bottom and
seatback. Don't say you weren't warned.

Another approach that some may find preferable is to wear a silk shirt soaked
in K-Y jelly.

When I think of what the world is missing because my book of essays and
life hints has failed to find a publisher, it brings tears to my eyes.
Another approach that some may find preferable is to apply glycerine to the
side of the nose.
(What Goya did was simply tell his daughter that her fiance had died.
I do believe he let her in on his little joke once he finished the
painting.)

Séquentiel Couleur à
Mémoire. Or Système séquentiel
Couleur à Mémoire. More often expanded with
avec instead of à, which is incorrect (to say nothing of
what we had here before). A loose translation of the
French is `System Essentially Contrary to the
American Method,' which can be translated back to yield Surtout
Éviter la Compatibilité Avec le Monde. (Monde means
`American.') The system takes a bit of memory: for each line, first one and
then a second chrominance signal is transmitted. (YUV
color coördinates are transmitted, which is more efficient in practice.)
More at video encoding. Cf.
NTSC, PAL.

SECM

Scanning ElectroChemical Microscopy.

second-best bed

A lot of toner cartridges have been spilled regarding this most famous
phrase from Will Shakespeare's will. I just want to add that the phrase can
also be found (see p. 29) in the text of The Apologia of Robert Keayne: The
Self-Portrait of a Puritan Merchant, ed. Bernard Bailyn (New York: Harper
& Rowe, 1964). The title page interposes the following between the title
and subtitle of the cover quoted above: ``The last will and testament of me,
Robert Keayne, all of it written with my own hands and began by me, mo: 6 1:
1653, commonly called August.'' (You know, until 1750, when the British Empire
adopted the Gregorian calendar, it also reckoned the new year as beginning with
March. But many people didn't entirely abide that, as is clear from the
beginning of P's famous diary.

A good example of the voluminous literature alluded to (though one with an odd
interpretation that abstracts testatory uses of ``second best'' from obscure
English legal history) is The Second Best Bed: Shakespeare's Will in a New
Light by Joyce Rogers (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993). On page 72
there you can find a paragraph of the usual examples of parallels that have
been adduced, not including the one above.

Online you can find
``Alas, Poor Anne: Shakespeare's `Second-Best Bed' in Historical
Perspective,'' an 18-page article on the subject (critical of the Stratford
man) by Bonner Miller Cutting, published in the Oxfordian in 2011.

second second

Most entries in this glossary seem to start out as parenthetical remarks
about other entries. With care and time, these parenthetical entries expand to
the point where they consist mostly of parenthetical comments tangential to the
subject of the parenthetical itself. But since you like it this way, and can't
remember what you originally came here to find out anyway, we'll carry on
carrying on.

Oh yeah, what I wanted to mention was that sometimes ``second second'' is
synonymous with ``third.'' One example occurs at our L2 entry. Another example occurs in the movie industry,
where ``second second assistant director'' is a synonym of ``third assistant
director.'' You may wonder which term is more undignified. It looks like a
calculation. One factor to include in it is that reportedly, ``third'' is
sometimes mispronounced to suggest a false etymology of the word that comes
behind it.

Eventually, this entry will be mostly about instances of numbering similar to
``second second.'' For example, we'll mention a distortion of traditional
Hebrew numbering that is used to avoid writing a reference to the name of God.
We won't bother explaining the Pentium II, Pentium III thing, since that's
already covered at an existing entry.
Later, we'll veer off into things that are somewhat more tenuously related to
``second second,'' like French base-twenty number
names. Somewhere along the line, some etymological quirk will catch my
attention, and the entry will end up being about that.

Secretarial Sciences

This is a good joke whether it is intended as such or not.

You can't have a science without specialization. Mine is experimental spelign.

I should be clear about the ``whether'' above. Many universities offer a
degree in this undiscipline, and though I think they have a lot of cheek, I
haven't noticed a tongue in any of them.

But be careful what you google for, you may get it back in adsense. I got
sidetracked into degrees in ``Fire Science,'' and for a week my banners and
margins were burning with invitations to get a degree in that subject.

Some web browsers entertain the user with an estimate of the time remaining
for a download to be completed. Typically, the estimate is based on the
time elapsed since downloading began (call this t) and the fraction of
the downloading file that has been transferred (call this f). The
simplest, and apparently most common, estimate of time remaining is

t
×
( 1 - f ) / f .

During a normal download, there is an initial burst of enthusiastic, high
bit-rate transmission. The technical term for this is sucker bait.
After anywhere from 10 to 90% of the file has been transferred, the process
is slowed or halted (technically: the tease). The precise profile
of this stage is a matter of careful engineering, with the design goal of
maximizing user pain (P). Too slow, and users give up in frustration,
prematurely limiting their irritation. Too fast, and users are pleased.
(The latter undesirable outcome can lead to user satisfaction and increased
load on precious computing resources.)

One design strategy involves a calibrated transfer of data that generates a
constant time-remaining estimate. Ideally, this requires

d / 1-f \
-- ( t --- ) = 0 ,
dt \ f /

or
f(t) = t / (t+ts) , where
ts
is the constant-by-design estimate of the time remaining for
download to be complete. The subscript s stands for Sisyphus.

secular simony

In the first chapter of Essays on Politics and Literature
(``Literature and Politics,'' originally published elsewhere), Bernard
Crick (no, not the DNA guy; a lit. guy) writes

... students of literature have had cause to be nervous of social
scientists plundering the golden treasury, often for partisan
purposes heavily disguised as science.

sed

Latin conjunction meaning `but.' It's almost
surprising that the Romans had such a word. You figure they'd use et
or even the enclitic -que (both meaning
`and') and expect you to figure out what they meant, or else that they'd use
some crazy construction involving ac and ut.

A prominent feature of Linnaeus's Latin style, at least in the Dedication, is
his omission of connectives, whether it be in a series of enumerations where no
semifinal et or final -que was written or in a pair
of contrasting terms where we might expect sed. This was a
familiar device of classical rhetoric and I have been at some pains to preserve
it in the translation, probably to the reader's annoyance.

[The comment refers to Heller's translation of Hortus Cliffortianus,
which Carolus Linnaeus published in 1737. In the
commentary following his translation, the quoted text is the first thing
mentioned under the rubric (p. 105) of ``Problems of translation.'']

SED

School of EDucation. Just to be sure that you don't confuse it with a
school for education, they should avoid actually having any education
take place there. Oh wait, that's already the case.

Sozialistische
Einheitspartei Deutschlands. `Socialist
Unity Party of [East] Germany.' A ``unity'' party in the sense of being a
combined party of the left -- the East German pieces of the earlier social
democratic and communist parties. With Eastern Germany, later East Germany
(GDR) under Soviet control, the SED was likewise
under communist control from the beginning; ultimately, communist control of
the party, like the country, was consolidated. The SED's lead role
(Führungsrolle) in the government of the
GDR was formalized in the 1968 constitution. As the
whole apparatus was coming apart in 1989, and as the party was hemorrhaging
membership, the name was changed -- first to SED/PDS and then
PDS.

sed

Stream EDitor. A kind of version of the standard
Unix line editor ed. Sed is a way of issuing
ed commands from the Unix command line.

In March 2004, the 15th AGM of SEDERI was held in Lisbon -- the first time it
had been held outside Spain. Following that meeting, the society changed its
name to the ``Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies.''
In various documents, the name appears in
Spanish (Sociedad Hispano-Portuguesa de
Estudios Renacentistas Ingleses), Portuguese (Sociedade
Hispano-Portuguesa de Estudos Renascentistas Ingleses), English, or in two
or all of these. The initialism was kept unchanged. There must be a name for
this common maneuver and the anachronistic acronyms that result.

As of February 2007, it seems that SEDERI could use some revitalization itself.
The last time it was mentioned in a major paper such as the Globe and
Mail was February 3, 2001 (in the Toronto Star -- is that a
stretch?). Under the caption ``SEDERI is being written about,'' the SEDERI
website helpfully reproduces an editorial from ``The Bulletin, the most read
community newspaper in Downtown Toronto.'' That editorial, from February 8,
2005, includes this mention of SEDERI:

``In trying to purge itself of the taint from its freewheeling days,
HRDC renamed itself HRSDC. (No the S isn't for
strippers, it's for skills. [That was true at the
time, anyway.]) Under the ministrations of Toronto's Joe Volpe, its
bureaucrats have gone berserk in an orgy of red tape that is strangling useful
programs, including the South East Downtown Economic Redevelopment Initiative
(SEDERI).'' Apparently the funding was being continued on a month-to-month
basis, and SEDERI was having trouble paying its bills. ``This current
situation of course threatens to overshadow much of the great work that SEDERI
accomplished in the past year, such as delivering the successful Southeast
Downtown Job & Career Fair held in October at St. Lawrence Market, the
series of Youth Employment Skills workshops delivered in the spring and summer,
and the recent Stakeholder Workshop & Public Forum on seeking local
solutions to getting our shelter resident population back into the workforce.''
The most recent activity on the SEDERI website is a blog entry from June 2005
to the effect that the Board of Directors was ``refocussing on the mission and
direction of the organization.''

`...a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to bring together all those in the
teaching profession and those who study the teaching of different languages and
their literatures who have the goal of promoting and increasing the study and
teaching of said subjects.'

Normal Spanish style is more florid and verbose
than normal English style. However, bureaucratese is universal.

SEDR

Society of Esthetic Dentistry of Romania.

SEDT

Synthetic Environment Dynamic Terrain. [For combat training.]

SEE

Signing Exact English. This is quite time-consuming. It is something like
speaking out the spellings of words in English that one would ordinarily just
pronounce. In sign languages, individual signs correspond to whole words,
roughly, although they may have a component morphology just as words have
significant phonemes such as affixes and inflections. Moreover, it should also
be understood that sign languages are independent languages with grammar,
vocabulary and semantics that are far from being in one-to-one correspondence
with any spoken language that a person may also use to communicate. SEE is
associated with the mainstreaming of deaf children (see
HOH entry for more).

Southern and Eastern Europe. One day, the partisans of ``Southeastern'' SEE (the red team) and the
partisans of ``Southern and Eastern'' SEE (the scarlet team) will fight a war
for control of this valuable acronym. The earth will turn crimson from the
ferocious bloodbath that will ensue. Battles will rage on Greek, Cyrillic, and
Roman fronts, I mean fonts. They've already nearly come to blows over
``Macedonia.''

SEED

Self Electroöptical Effect Device. My sloppy notes say this was
invented by Dave Miller at AT&T in about 1981.
The device is essentially a p-i-n diode in which light controls the electric
field configuration and thus the light absorption, leading to much larger
nonlinear optic effects than one would get from direct photon-photon
interaction, or even from local electron-mediated photon-photon interaction.

Teaser in the candy machine. You know, just twenty-five Kit-Kat bars
provide the minimum daily adult requirement of protein. They also provide enough fat.

SEERI

St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research
Institute. On its website, SEERI describes itself as ``India's advanced
teaching and learning centre for Syriac language and heritage.'' I suppose the
acronym might be a punning backronym.
An institution of the Syro Malankara Catholic Church, SEERI was established in
1985 at Kottayam, Kerala, India. Kottayam is also the location of Mahatma
Gandhi University of Kerala State (MGU was
established only two years earlier), of which SEERI is an officially sanctioned
``Regional and [sic] Research Center.''

In Winter Olympics years, since the time that those have not been Summer
Olympics years (i.e., 1994+4n, n a small nonegative integer), SEERI has
hosted an International Syriac Conference. (There were two earlier such
conferences, in 1987 and 1990.)
They say that their
``publication, The Harp, mainly contains papers presented in the Syriac
conferences.'' That now seems to account for about two of the annual volumes.
``Other volumes of The Harp contain learned papers from scholars all
over the world.'' I have the volume XXV before me (2010) and, apart from
Syriac words under analysis, its articles are mostly in English (there's an
article in French and an article and a book
review in German; nothing in Malayalam).

see through

There are two similar expressions with these two words, and non-native
speakers can easily confuse them.

In the natural sense of the collocation of see and
through, the preposition through takes a noun (possibly a noun phrase) object, which is
the thing through which the subject of the phrase sees. For example,
Superman can see through doors, a perceptive person can see
through your pretenses, etc. One can typically imagine a line of sight
through the named object of the preposition. The verb see is
often intransitive, as in the preceding examples, but not necessarily
(as in ``see the sun through a break in the clouds'').

In the idiom similar to this, see is transitive. E.g.,
``courage will see you through the current troubles.'' One can
sometimes imagine a line of sight from the subject to object (of see):
``I will see you through this.'' The expression is usefully ambiguous:
in the last example, it probably means that ``I will be with you (or be
there-for-you) during this' (something a little weaker than ``I will
walk you through this''). But it could, just barely, also mean ``I
will see you on the other side of this; you will get through this and I
will see you again.''

In this idiom, through may not have an explicit object (``love
will see you through'') or it may look as if it has a prepositional
phrase as predicate (``we will see you through to the end''). One can
think of through in these abstracted forms as a particle, like
out in the ``verb + particle'' construct pass out. In
the last example, ``to the end'' modifies the transitive construct
adverbially.

You can sound very silly using the wrong expression. In late 2003, the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was trying
to decide whether to site the world's first large-scale nuclear fusion reactor
in France or Japan.
Claudie Haignere, France's minister of research and new technologies, issued a
statement through her ministry on December 20 that was either originally in, or
eventually translated into, Broken
English. It said that the fusion project ``remains an absolute priority
for Europe. We are utterly convinced that our human, financial and
technological advantages should allow us to see through this project.'' As it
stands, the statement suggests the the project is a kind of screen to be seen
through, implying that it is a deception and a boondoggle. Unless the author
was having an attack of candor, the intended English was ``...to see this
project through.'' (No French version of this
statement was published in any of the French-language news sources searchable
by Lexis-Nexis.)

Dylan Thomas wrote a famous poem to his dying father, entitled ``Do Not Go
Gentle Into That Good Night.'' He used the
adjectivegentle rather than the
adverbgently, because he meant to describe
not how the father should go, but how the father should be as he went.
The gentle is an adjective because it modifies the noun father
(implicit subject of the imperative verb). This is a perfectly standard form
of expression, parallel to ``he ran laughing through the underbrush'' or ``he
stands red-faced at the door.'' I think a similar distinction is at work in
the see-through idioms, but I haven't figured it out yet.

The car of Emilio Segrè had a bumper sticker that said ``My owner
has a Nobel Prize.'' At right is a picture of the owner.

SEI

Software Engineering Institute.

SEI

Strategic Environmental Initiative.

Seinfeld

A money machine for NBC. Described in BusinessWeek for the week of June 2,
1997.

SEIU

Service Employees International Union.
During the long decline in union membership over the last decades of the
twentieth century, with 1.7 million members as of 2004, it was the largest
union in the AFL-CIO. In 2005, on the occasion
of the meeting that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the AFL-CIO merger, it
and the Teamsters Union bolted.

seken

Japanese: `society,' roughly translated. Supposedly differs from
Western notion of `society' (seken) in
connoting the various ties that connect individuals within the society.
Oh.

German, from selbst (`self') + verständlich
(`understandable'). May be translated variously as `natural,' `obvious,'
`goes without saying,' `impossible not to understand.' Indeed, if you
understand verstehen (`understand') then selbstverständlich
is itselfselbstverständlich. I hardly know why I bothered
to give it a glossary entry.

selected data

Data tendentiously selected to seem to support the author's claims.

Selected Letters of James Thurber

Edited by Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks. Copyright Helen Thurber, 1980,
1981. My copy is a 1982 Penguin paperback, but presumably it should be no
trouble to get a copy off the shelf at your local Barnes & Noble. (Yeah,
I'm real good at presuming.)

selected response

A testing-industry euphemism for ``multiple choice.''

SELENE

Sensible and Efficient Lighting to Enhance the Nighttime Environment.
A New York group that lobbies to limit night-time light pollution.

S.E.L.F.

Stimulation, Entropy, Legibility, and Fragmentation. This acronym is
introduced in an article mentioned at the Spam
entry, which is worth a quick skim. (The glossary entry, I mean. You should
ignore the article, as I've already summarized all of its useful content.)
Like the author, most of his readers don't understand entropy, so he might as
well have it mean scattered attention.

This is not intended to imply, as it does (and correctly), that a thing
thus characterized adheres to itself. Instead, it emphasizes that the
adhesive is prepositioned where it will be needed. Early in the twentieth
century, this was a novelty. Now the name persists as an irony.

self-aggrandizing praise

This entry isn't about mere name-dropping, and it's not about
self-interested praise unless the interest of the praising party is primarily
to be aggrandized. It is not even about building up the reputation of someone
else so as to bask in the reflected glory (parental praise, boosterism, etc.).
Rather, it is about a class of unclassy behaviors that needs a name, and the
head term was the best I could come up with on short notice.

Unfortunately, later I forgot what specifically it was a term for. I
think it was intended to refer to praise that ostentatiously implies that the
praiser has the special understanding or perception necessary to sit in
judgment of the praised. A subspecies of condescension.

self-blocking

Enhancement-mode. The term applies to insulating-gate transistors. The idea is that if
VGS = 0, then the transistor will be in the off state.

self-description

A short work of fiction.

self-evident

Unconsidered and arbitrary. Obvious.

self-published

It is certainly true that many worthy books fail to find a legitimate
publisher. But many more unworthy books also fail to find a publisher. Not
even counting ``commercial'' books and romances, more than enough really bad
books slip through to give us a good idea of what we are most fortunately
missing.

Oh, enough philosophy. I want to talk about one of my own favorites in the
genre of very bad books: A Short History of Technology. It's
self-published by proxy. That is, it was ``A Publication of THE THOMAS ALVA
EDISON FOUNDATION, INC.,'' but the authors, Vice Admiral Harold G. Bowen and
Mr. Charles F. Kettering, were Executive Director and President, respectively,
of that laudable foundation.

The book is indeed short -- a ``booklet'' in the words of the author of its
foreword (C.F. Kettering). This requires a bit of compression and scanting of
details. Here's a breezy sentence on page 19: ``In passing we must not forget
the great contributions of Euclid to geometry and Hipparchus and Ptolemy to
trigonometry.''

Professional historians looked down their noses at the Durants, who depended
almost entirely on secondary research for their sweeping vistas of history.
Short is a few scratches below that. Cited works include Webster's
New International Dictionary, 2nd Edition and (47 times in 91 pages) Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th Edition (not further
specified). (Kettering, an important inventor, now has his own entry in the
Britannica.) Many pedestrian passages are ``reprinted with permission.'' I
imagine the permission was granted by the publishers and not the authors. It
must have been galling to Herbert Butterfield to have a passage quoted from his
The Origins of Modern Science. A page or two after the quoted material,
he enveighs against the kind of Whig history that Short is such a
parodic example of (example at HOT entry).

self-reflexive

A silly literary term meaning `reflexive.' I mean, reflexive refers
to the self, right? So it means `self-self'! Of course, I suppose, upon
reflection, that reflexive could have some meaning related to another
sense of the word reflection, so self-reflexive might mean
`characterized by reflection (contemplation) on itself,' just as
self-refluxive might mean `characterized by refluxing on itself.'
Hmmm. It's a good thing this is really just a microelectronics glossary,
or I might be compelled to actually find out.
[Split-infinitive alert!] We'll just
suppose that self-reflexive means `reflexively reflexive' and leave
it at that, okay?

Incidentally, the perceptive and/or hip student of this glossary will
perhaps have noticed that this glossary is itself self-reflexive (setting
aside the surprisingly difficult question of whether that is actually a
meaningful observation). Indeed, your glossarist is walloping the gentle
reader over the head with manifold demonstrations of this ambiguously
meaningful, uh, fact. Let's face it: the student
of this glossary who
has not noticed this fact is basically a COMPLEAT NINCOMPOOP!
and is kindly called upon to take notice of the fact (of glossary
self-reflectivity, I mean), so that we can all move on.

Now then, that we are all reading from the same page (S04.html, to be
precise, or maybe S.cgi), your
glossarist raises the following
question which will no doubt fascinate you: we know that the SBF glossary
is a (most excellent, of course) work of
metanonfiction, but is the Stammtisch in se self-reflexive?
The answer, you will be relieved to know, is just a hyperlink away.

self-regarding

Concerned with oneself or one's interest. The word doesn't carry the
necessary connotation of excess, of conceit (what was called
self-conceit before the other meanings of conceit became rare).
But what, then, are we to call a pompous, self-absorbed work like the
philosopher Eric Voegelin's Anamnesis?
Here are some excerpts from the mercifully abridged translation of Gerhart
Niemeyer (Notre Dame and London: U. of N.D. Pr., 1978).

In 1943 I had arrived at a dead-end in my attempts to find a
theory of man, society, and history that would permit an adequate
interpretation of the phenomena in my chosen field of studies. ...
...
The default of the school-philosophies was caused by a
restriction of the horizon similar to the restrictions of the consciousness
that I could observe in the political mass movements. But if that was true, I
had observed the restriction, and recognized it as such, with the criteria of
the observation coming from a consciousness with a larger horizon, which in
this case happened to be my own. ...
...
What I had discovered was consciousness in the concrete, in the
personal, social, and historical existence of man, as the specifically human
mode of participation in reality. At the time, however, I was far from clear
about the full bearing of the discovery because I did not know enough about the
great precedents of existential analysis in antiquity, by far surpassing, in
exactness and luminosity of symbolization, the contemporary efforts. I was not
aware, for instance, of the Heraclitian analysis of public and private
consciousness, in terms of xynon and the idiotes,
or of a Jeremiah's analysis of prophetic existence, before I learned Greek and
Hebrew in the 1930s.
Nevertheless, I was very much aware that my ``larger horizon''
was not a personal idiosyncrasy but surrounded me from all sides as a social
and historical fact from which I could draw nourishment for my own
consciousness. ...

I know what you're thinking: ``Sure, but that's the beginning of chapter one
-- introductory remarks. Personal experience for orientational purposes.''
Alright then, from page 41:

Our old family seamstress in Oberkassel, Mrs. Balters, has much
influenced me gently. She introduced me to the Leather-Stocking Tales;
I still remember distinctly the much-used and greasy book that she brought. I
must have been about six years old. Leather-Stocking constituted an inner
kingdom of adventure; I do not remember having understood America to be the
scene of the tales.
More important were our theological conversations. Mrs. Balters
had excellent information about Paradise. All that I know about Paradise I
learned from her. ...

self-styled

The meaning of this word would be
self-evident if the usage styled for named were still
common. ``Self-styled'' means self-named. It does not mean
self-appointed. It is inappropriate to use ``self-styled'' when there
is no evident designation referred to, or when that designation is not one
to be chosen by the named entity. Here is an example of incorrect
usage, from Douglas Herbert, CNN.com Europe writer:

As Americans squabble over whether their presidential cliff-hanger is a case
of democracy at its finest or constitutional confusion, many Europeans are
relishing their self-styled role as a sort of transatlantic heckling gallery.

(In the same article, Herbert quotes a number of malapropisms attributed to
George W. Bush. He expresses skepticism, but fails to note that they are
well-known to have been spoken by J. Danforth Quayle. Depend
upon it: someone who stumbles on vocabulary is likely to have other faults.)

SELIM

Sociedad
Española de Lengua y Literatura Inglesa
Medieval. Official English name:
`Spanish Society for Mediaeval English Language
& Literature.' The ``Medieval'' spelling is also used. For your
research convenience, in all quoted text of this entry I have made certain to
transcribe that word in precisely the form in which it appears in my source.
SELIM doesn't
seem to be too consistent or strict about the spelling. They're also not very
strict about the medieval time period. The ``usual areas of interest of the
society's members'' are described in the foreword to the 2003 conference
proceedings as historical linguistics, Old and Middle English language and
literature, textual studies, and the contemporary reception of the Middle Ages.

Well, selim is one form of the Arabic word salam (cognate with
Hebrew shalom), and occurs as a Muslim name. During the medieval era,
high accomplishments in language and literature were reached in the Islamic
world -- the highest, in some estimations. So there's a connection of sorts.

SELIM's website makes a distinction between all-caps unitalicized ``SELIM'' for
the society and italicized ``Selim'' for the society's journal (ISSN
1132-631X) published (mostly) annually since 1989. Most of the content is in
Modern English,

(WARNING: the rest of this entry contains more boring detail unrelieved by
paragraph breaks and traces of nuts.)

at least in the issues I have physically held in my nonmetaphorical hands. The
regular articles have an English abstract followed by a Spanish abstract. The
top of the front cover reads

The society has also published selections of papers presented at its mostly
annual conference. The conference is referred to using the society name and a
numeral (an ordinal number represented by a Roman or Arabic numeral, or the
year). For example, the 15th was held in early October 2003 at the University
of Murcia (¡lisp when you say that!) and 15 of the nearly 50
contributions to that conference appeared as papers in Medieval English
Literary and Cultural Studies -- SELIM XV (yeah, ``Medieval'' sic,
but the long dash is printed as a period), which
was published in 2004. Articles mostly in English, abstracts all English.
(The title, format, and publication venue for conference proceedings have not
been very consistent.) SELIM I took place in 1988, and the conferences were
initially annual, but it seems they skipped 2000 and 2004, and the latest
proceedings available on the website (in 2012) is for SELIM 16 (2005).
Published editions of Selim are also available there, through Selim
17 (nominally the 2010 issue, but the society's journals tend to be
copyrighted and, it seems, first available only one or two years after their
nominal publication year). I should mention that the most recent issue of
Selim and of the SELIM proceedings are both currently (May 2012)
dead links; I did manage to bring up Selim 17 and read a bit before, but
then my Adobe Acrobat landed in the undernet.

Structural Equation Modeling. Described as ``the most sophisticated
correlational tool available'' by an unsophisticated user.

Semarnap

Secretaría de Medio Ambiente,
Recursos Naturales y Pesca.
The Mexican government's erstwhile `Secretariat of
Environment, Natural Resources and Fisheries.' All I plan to find out about it
for the time being is what can be gleaned at
IMTA entry.

Semarnat

Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y
Recursos Naturales.
The Mexican government's `Secretariat of
Environment and Natural Resources.' All I plan to find out about it for the
time being is what can be gleaned at IMTA entry.

SEMATECH

A US government-industry-academic consortium for Semiconductor technology,
described here.

Society for Early Modern Classical Reception. (That's the reception -- how
it was received, the reaction to it -- of the classical heritage in the early
modern era.)

semester

A word for a period lasting approximately four months, derived from a
word meaning six months. Sounds like grade inflation, doesn't it?

In detail: German universities used the term Semester, derived from the
Latin[cursus] semestris (`six-month [course
-- implicitly, of study]'). Most universities in most places I know of use
a semester system -- two long terms separated by two long breaks, often with
short academic terms for intensive or short courses during one or both breaks.

In the US, the typical semester has about fifteen weeks of classes and a
final-exam period of something over a week, plus some vacation days.
Typically, the Spring term runs from mid-January to mid-May and a fall
term
from just after Labor Day, or early September, to mid-December. Obviously this
makes the schedule for fall a bit tighter, so although the mid-March ``Spring
Break'' is an institution, the longest break during the fall semester is
typically the long weekend of Thanksgiving. A lot of US schools have a
``quarter'' system, but this is the semester entry, so we can't discuss that.

In Japan a semester system is standard, with the school year beginning in
April and final exams around the end of January. The Japanese word for
semester (i.e. term) is gakki. [The double-k, incidentally, is
not an artefact of transliteration. The k's are a geminate pair, with a
syllable break in the middle. The word gakki makes a minimal pair with
gaki, a derogatory word for `kid' (i.e., `child, young person').
Oh yeah, this is all covered at the gakki
entry. Well, you probably needed to know it right away.]

A material which, in its pure state at low temperature, has a band gap
separating a filled valence band and an empty conduction band. At very low
temperature the pure (``undoped,'' ``intrinsic'') semiconductor conductivity
goes to zero exponentially (as does the carrier density, displaying Arrhenius
behavior with an activation energy less than
the bandgap). (In metals the conductivity obeys a power law reflecting the
width of the Fermi distribution). The difference between insulators and
semiconductors is only quantitative and not qualitative: larger-bandgap
materials (> 2 eV) generally have low-enough conductivities to be
considered insulators.

The common semiconductors
(homopolar and
compound semiconductors)
have relatively weak electron-phonon coupling
and electron-electron
interactions, so carriers produced by doping are quasifree, with electron
and hole mobilities much greater than 10 cm²/V-sec. At low temperatures,
in single-crystal material that has been
modulation doped, phonon,
defect and ionized-impurity scattering are all small and mobilities on the
order of 107 cm²/V-sec have been achieved.

SEMO

SouthEast MissOuri State University.
It's possible that
this 1986
advertisement for a Philosophy Department position, written frankly and
(therefore) not intended for publication, is the university's main claim to
fame. ``Our students tend to be poorly prepared for college level work,
intellectually passive, interested primarily in partying, and culturally
provincial in the extreme. ... The academic environment at SEMO is distinctly
non-intellectual -- somewhat like a Norman Rockwell painting -- and the
candidate cannot expect to attract students by offering courses that assume
innate curiosity about ideas and books, or intellectual playfulness, or
independence of moral and political thought.'' I'm sure things are much better
now.

Semp.

SEMPstressy. Equivalent to seamstressy. The place of business or
the activity of a sempstress or (equiv.) seamstress. Of the four terms, only
the last seems to have survived past the beginning of the twentieth
century.

One of the most popular puerile jokes among
Latin students: ``Semper ubi
sub ubi,'' though not grammatical as Latin, consists of words that can
be translated individually as `Always where under where.' Ha, ha.
It may not surprise you to learn that the Classics discipline has a concept of
``too much fun,'' as illustrated in
this Classics-List posting.

The Chop Shop again offers what it
calls ``Latin Proverb
Undies'' for women and ex-boyfriends. They look cheap and they cost $9 to
$11 apiece. The ``proverbs'' are not proverbs but mostly riffs on real Latin
proverbs or translations of common English expressions (e.g., ``Carpe
Noctem'' instead of ``Carpe Diem''; ``Amor Caecus Est,''
`Love Is Blind''), and they're mostly grammatical. They're not very sexy, but
the print is small enough that you have to get close to read it. This reminds
me of something that happened to me that I had better not retell yet.

sen

A monetary subunit equal to one one-hundredth of a Japanese yen. The 1913
Merriam-Webster described the sen as a ``Japanese coin, worth about one half of
a cent.'' The Japanese yen (100 sen) is currently worth about a penny of US
currency, and the current Merriam-Webster website (you do realize that the
surname Webster is an old word meaning weaver, right?) has a
``Money Table'' that
describes Japanese sen, along with Macedonian deni and Rwandan
centimes, as ``[n]ow a subdivision in name only.'' Hence a one-sen coin
wouldn't be worth the effort of putting in your pocket. It would however, be
worth at least three points if placed on a Scrabble board.

The Japanese sen discussed above is written as a kanji. Kanji are
traditional Chinese characters, typically pronounced in at least a couple
of ways in Japanese. This sen kanji has a Mandarin pronunciation
Romanized as qián. The Mainland Chinese currency, the yuan, is
subdivided into 100 fen, which I imagine are something else.

Yuan, yen, and won (Korean currency unit) all look like they might be the same
word. After all, what's a vowel (or a semivowel) among friends (or enemies).
The ``English-Chinese Dictionary (Unabridged)'' edited by Lu Gusun asserts
firmly that the Korean word is derived from the Chinese yuán.
[No Chinese etymology is offered for chon (or jeon or jun), the hundredth part
of either Korea's won.] The Japanese word is a bit more of a problem, and this
dictionary unaccountably offers yuán as its origin (albeit
tentatively). One small problem is that its pronunciation in Japanese is
``en.'' A substantial problem is that its kanji is different from that of
yuán. The kanji for en means `circle,' and the
(different) hanji for yuán means `round [thing].'

Sen is also the name of the hundredth part of the base monetary unit of
various other countries. It is (or possibly was) 1/100 of an Indonesian
rupiah, a Bruneian dollar, a Malaysian ringgit or dollar, and a Cambodian riel.
(The Bruneian sen is also called a cent.) The American Heritage Dictionary
(AHD4) agrees with the Lu Gusun dictionary on the
origin of the Japanese sen (``from Chinese (Mandarin)
qián, money, coin''). It traces the Indonesian sen
through senti back to cent. The cent was 1/100 of a Dutch guilder. On
historical or geographical grounds, I suppose the Malaysian and Bruneian
sen have the same origin. I can't tell exactly what the Lu Gun
dictionary has to say, since it says it mostly in Chinese, but it uses the same
symbol for the Indonesian and Cambodian sen (different from the one used
for the Japanese sen). FWIW, 100 Vietnamese xu are worth one Vietnamese
dong.

Senate. If I had to guess, I'd guess this referred to the modern one in
Washington, DC.

Sen.

Seneca. A Roman writer. Also (not usually abbreviated) a
North American Indian nation in New York. It's amazing isn't it? Most of the
names now used in New York State were given by European settlers and their
descendants, and many of those names were assigned by eighteenth-century
academics. The last were, by the nature of education in their day, all
classical scholars, and they chose names of places (Ithaca, Palmyra, Syracuse,
Rome,...) and people (Ovid, Cicero and Tully [for Marcus Tullius Cicero], etc.)
familiar from classical antiquity. So when the autochthons got a chance to
name something, what did they choose?

Send 'em a message.

Bewilder 'em with inarticulate truculence.

senight

Or se'night. Old word for week (seven-night) still in use in the
early nineteenth century, to judge from Jane Austen's letters. Makes
the still-extant fortnight (fourteen-night, two weeks) seem to
have family.

senior discount

It's not just discrimination against the young; portions may be smaller.

senior-to-be

A term roughly equivalent to ``rising senior,'' but which I've only
encountered in the context of the college football offseason. At the beginning
of the calendar year, a junior who may play football the following academic
year (as a senior) is a senior-to-be. At some point in the summer, I guess
this person may become an ``incoming senior'' or ``returning senior.'' I'll
try to find out whether this is by ``eligibility'' or academic standing.

`Sense,' in French, with many of the same
senses (including that one) as the English noun,
but most commonly meaning `direction.'

Sens

A French city at the location of ancient
Agedincum, capital city of Sennones. The Sénons were one of the largest
nations of Celtic Gaul, and are mentioned by Julius Caesar (so I don't have to
tell you that he conquered them).

A power MOSFET with a split drain. Geometry determines a fixed ratio of
the drain currents, about 1000 to one. The narrow, low-current drain contact
is sensed to determine current in the high-current arm (the alternative is
to place a small resistance in series with a single high-current drain,
dissipating plenty of power and not getting high accuracy). Made by
Motorola, Powerex and others.

Example of use: as the WSJ reported on August 1,
2005 (article available on line
from the Pittsburgh
PG), the FDA and EPA
delayed many years in issuing a public warning about mercury levels in canned
tuna, and then issued one that was vague and apparently inadequate.
Interviewed for the story, former EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt explained:
``Mercury is bad and fish is good. We needed to choose the right words that
would give people a sense of knowledge without creating unwarranted fear.''

sensible

Safe and boring.

sens. obsc.

Latin, `obscure sense.' Heck, if they wanted to
represent that in a way true to its meaning, they should have abbreviated it
``-e -o.''

sensu strictu

Latin, `strict sense,' literally (or in some
sense strictly). Used equivalently to ``strictly speaking'' in English. In
some other languages:
Italian: senso stretto
German: genau genommen.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization. Normally, ``foo optimization'' is optimization
of foo... by adjustment of something that affects foo. In SEO, however, the
object is to optimize the output of foo. Typically, it involves adjusting
one's web pages or web site so as to optimize the position or visibility of
the pages in web surfers' search results (SERPs, to
be hip). Hint: a lot of web sites use so much Flash content that the search
engine spiders don't find any search-worthy text. They may not be able to
follow cleverly marked-up snazzy links.

SEO

Société Électrique de
l'Our. The name is in French and the
website is in German. Naturally, it's the Luxembourg power utility. The major
stockholders in the concern are the Grand Duchy and a German company called RWE
Power, each with a 40.3% stake.

The Our flows south for 78 km, approximately along the border of Germany with
Belgium and then with Luxembourg; it is a tributary of the Sauer. I don't know
how much of Luxembourg's electric power is hydroelectric; power companies like
to emphasize their ``green'' side. Their homepage says they operate a pump-fed
power station at Vianden (a historic town on the Our) for peak power
production. They don't say what powers the pumps, but they go on quickly to
say that they also operate hydroelectric and wind-power facilities.

Anyway, the river names are interesting. Sauer is a cognate of, and in
ordinary contexts has the same meaning as, the English word sour. (See,
however, the acid entry.) The name of the
Our is apparently a French spelling of the old German name Ur. There's
an evidently unrelated German word Uhr (same pronunciation) that means
(and is cognate with) `hour' and also means `clock, watch.' There's another
morpheme ur- which is more interesting.

Many English-speakers find ur- a useful prefix for which there is no
adequate English translation. It refers to ultimate origin. Thus,
ursprünglich is an adverb that can be translated `original' but
feels more like `in ultimate origin.' English has borrowed Ursprache,
`protolanguage,' and Urtext, `original text.' (In the relevant context,
however, this ought to mean `original lyrics.') There is no known connection
between this morpheme and the Biblical city of Ur whence came Abraham.

There might be a connection with the Latinorior,
oriri, `to rise' (it looks funny because it's a deponent verb, okay?) and
words like orient,origin, and abort that are ultimately
derived from that. The Latin is believed to come from an Indo-European root
*er-, with reflexes *ar, *or, *art(a) in Germanic, that yielded the English
words are, arise, raise, [the verb] rear, and rise.

In Old High German, er was a preposition meaning `from, out of,' and
ur was a semantically undifferentiated alternate pronunciation. Both
forms ultimately ceased to be used prepositionally, but they survive as
distinct prefixes. There is also an adverb eher, meaning `earlier,'
which originated as a comparative form of er. So far I haven't been
able to find a linguistic reference work that makes the connections I have
failed to make explicit in this paragraph: that the er roots that
yielded modern German ur- and eher are identical with the *er-
that yielded origin. (It would also be interesting if there were a
connection with the extinct aurochs, whose name is ultimately Germanic; in Old
English, for example, the name was ur.)

Someone Else's Problem. A device that makes people not notice things.
Introduced by Douglas Adams (DNA) in one of the
sequels to his HHGttG.

SEPA

Single Euro Payments Area. I guess that's like the
eurozone version of a
dollar-store checkout counter. Oh wait --
that would probably have to be a ``single-euro payments area.'' Maybe there's
some clarification at the PSD entry.

SEPA

(PRC) State Environmental Protection
Administration. The PRC's highest (ministerial) administrative authority in
environmental management. The agency that decides it's okay to keep building
stupid dams. Until 1998, its name was often translated as National
Environmental Protection Administration (NEPA).

One of the separate, usually green bits that from the calyx of a flower.
The calyx is the cup-like outer base of a flower. Most flowers have one, and
there are usually two to five sepals in a calyx. The Spanish words are sépalo and
cáliz. German is always good for a laugh: Kelchblatt
and Blütenkelch, resp. Das Blatt is `the leaf' (of a tree
or a book); die Blüte is `the blossom.' Die Blume is `the
flower.' All of these Germanic bl- words are cognate with each other (and with
the English words blade and bloom), and more distantly with
Latinflor.

Der Kelch is `the goblet,' or similar drinking glass, and comes from
an early (pre-Christian) adoption of the Latin calicem (accusative of
calix) into West Germanic. Old English had a cognate, but later
versions of the word, borrowed from ecclesiastical Latin and from Old French
(in the thirteenth century and then again in the fourteenth), each successively
extinguished use of earlier cognates, leaving Modern English with
chalice.

The Latin calix that is the origin of the base
noun of the German Blütenkelch
(meaning calyx) is in fact unrelated to the word calyx. The
Latincalyx is a borrowing of the Greek kályx
(outer covering of a plant part such as a fruit, flower, or bud), which comes
from the verb kalýptein , `to cover.' However, confusion of
calix and calyx is common in the scientific literature, and
calyx is now widely used for any cup-like organ.

separated at birth

Our little contribution to the tracking of this phenomenon is the
observation that Anne Sweeney (Co-Chair Disney Media Networks and President,
Disney-ABC Television Group), particularly as she appeared on the December 2005
cover of Pink magazine, is a twin of Angela Merkel, who became prime
minister of Germany toward the end of 2005.

seppuku

Japanese term for ritual suicide. Harakiri is just an ugly word
that means `belly-slitting.'

This entry pahrt of the Japanese berry inaforamashan rin. Preeze now to
proceed to sumo.

SEPT

Service d'Études communes de La
Poste et de France Télécom. [`Joint Research Service of
the Post Office and France Telecom'] ``Recherche d'aujourd'hui:
technologies et services de demain.'' [`Today's research: tomorrow's
technologies and services.'] Electronic commerce, fancy email tricks, that
sort of stuff. No English page yet. Was scheduled to become le CNET de Caen at the end of 1997.

Spanish for `seventh art.' Alternate term
for película (`film') or cine (`cinema, movies'). The
term is predicated on the earlier designation of six beaux arts:
architecture, dance, sculpture, music, painting, and poetry, in no particular
order. Okay, in alphabetical order when translated into Spanish. Happy now?
The term beaux arts itself is believed to have been coined by Charles
Batteaux and introduced in his Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un
même principe (1746). [In 1752 the term beaux arts also
appeared in the famous encyclopedia of Diderot (and d'Alembert and others),
but there it designated the four ``plastic arts'': architecture, sculpture,
painting, and engraving.]

Ricciotto Canudo
(b. 1879), an Italian film theorist, published a manifesto on October 25, 1911,
entitled ``La Naissance d'un sixième art - Essai sur le
cinématographe.'' (This was published in
French because Canudo was by then established as
a leading figure in the French avant-garde. Except while serving in the
French and later the Italian military during WWI,
Canudo lived in Paris from 1902 until his death in 1923.) In this manifesto he
argued that cinema synthesized the ``spatial arts'' (architecture, sculpture,
and painting) with the ``temporal arts'' (music and dance). Okay, the quoted
terms are not literal quotes from the original essay. I suppose he wrote
``arts spatiaux et temporels'' or somesuch.

Anyway, at some point he seems to have noticed that there was already a sixth
art, whichever it was, and by 1922 he had founded La gazette de sept
arts. The next year he published an essay better known than the 1911
effort, this one probably entitled ``Manifeste des Sept Arts.'' The
French
Wikipédia
page pour Canudo gives the title ``Manifeste du septième
art,'' which seems more sensible to me, but l'université de
Metzserves
a page for Canudo that shows what appears to be a scan of the cover, with
the Sept Arts title. In any case, that particular essay went through
a few earlier versions, variously published in France and Italy. According to
that U. Metz page, Canudo introduced the term le septième art in
1912.

Septimus

A Roman praenomen that, while relatively unpopular in Roman times (see
the tria nomina entry for a top-ten list) appears to have enjoyed a modest
Anglophone vogue in recent centuries, becoming comparable in frequency to
Quintus and Sextus,
and clearly more frequent than Octavius in fiction.
Perhaps the most famous Septimus was the Roman Emperor (193-211) L. Septimus Severus (here, of course, Septimus is
a gentilicium). He seems to have taken his cognomen a bit too seriously, or
severely. His personal motto was Laboremus, `let's work.' Notice the
plural. I think it was Leibniz who looked forward to the day when moral
questions could be resolved on a scientific basis. Then when an argument
became heated, someone would simply say calculemus.

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) clearly fancied the name Septimus. The most
prominent Septimus in his work is Rev. Septimus Harding, who figures in his
Barchester stories [The Warden, 1855; Barchester Towers, 1857;
The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1867]. Trollope also has a Rev. Septimus
Blake in The Way We Live Now (1875). In Phineas Redux (1874),
one of his characters misremembers the name of Quintus Slide, publisher of
salacious gossip, as ``Mr. Septimus Slope, or whatever his name is.''

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, (1870), Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
included a minor canon ``Rev. Septimus Crisparkle,'' so named, as explained
parenthetically, ``because six little brother Crisparkles before him went out,
one by one, as they were born, like six weak little rushlights, as they were
lighted.'' Dickens chose memorable, evocative names that were often puns,
onomatopoeic, or both, or close. In this instance, he has to insert a little
story to make his pun. Other and better examples:

Thomas Gradgrind, a great believer in Facts, and Dickens's representative
of insensitive scientific materialism (not yet Scientific
Materialism) in Hard Times (1854).

Mr. M'Choakumchild, master of the experimental school established by Mr.
Thomas Gradgrind.

Luke Honeythunder, a somewhat detestable bureaucrat of the philanthropic
persuasion, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). The story also has
two orphans surnamed Landless (seems almost trite, after King John). A lot of
orphans in this story. Another is ``Rosa Bud.'' This is ridiculous! Observe
that Edwin Drood is dated to the year Dickens died. We don't get to find out
how the novel was supposed to end.

``Pip'' (nickname of Philip Pirrip, hero of Great Expectations,
first published in serial form 1860-61).

Ebenezer Scrooge. Really, what more is there to say? A Christmas
Carol, 1843.

Before moving on, back to Septimus, I'd like to mention Smerdyakov -- half-wit,
maybe half-brother to The Brothers Karamazov (by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, as
if you didn't know that, 1879-1880), and murderer of their father and himself.
The name suggests his place of birth (an out-house).

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) included both a Septimus and an Octavius in his
The Moonstone (1868). Octavius Guy (that's a name) is bug-eyed, just
like a lot of bass-players, and that's all I'm going to tell you about him, but
it might be relevant. Septimus Luker (not ``Lukier,'' as it says in the
Cyclopedia of Literary Characters) is a moneylender who takes the
Moonstone diamond for safekeeping from a guy who stole it and who is eventually
found dead. A moneylender is a shady character -- someone who may be engaged
in a legit business, but irregular opportunities have a way of cropping up.
Now think about Bogie. In The Maltese
Falcon he plays a private detective, and in Casablanca a nightclub
owner. Two demimondain professions. In each case, Bogie gets care of a
highly valued piece of stolen property, and various people die in mysterious
circumstances. As for scary or scared-looking eyes, I can't remember whether
that's covered in MF.

Wilkie Collins, I might mention, made a career writing novels that were
disparaged in his time as ``sensational'' (Moonstone was not in this
category). Eventually, I'll probably mention another of his novels at the nemo entry. Can't wait, huh? Collins had a close
personal association with Charles Dickens from about 1851 until the latter's
death; his younger brother Charles married Dickens's daughter Katie.

One of the landmarks of twentieth-century fiction is Virginia Woolf's Mrs.
Dalloway (1925). (I'm writing in freshman essay mode, eh?) One of the
important characters, by some measures the most courageous and sympathetic, and
clearly representing Virginia Woolf's romantic rebellion against
nineteenth-century rationalism (What, again? Didn't Dickens cover that in
Hard Times?) is Septimus Warren Smith. He's married to an Italian
woman named Lucrezia, but in this story he and not she commits suicide.
It's a wonder professors who have to read hundreds of freshman comp essays
don't commit suicide pretty often too. Three suicides mentioned so far in this
entry, by my count. Ah, literature. I firmly approve the use of uncommon
names for people with common surnames, but this seems to happen more in fiction
than in life. Videcamp.

You know, having slogged through to the end of this entry myself, I have to
admit it grows a bit dutiful after this point, even boring. You might as well
follow the camp link.

Disraeli's Vivian Grey (1826) included a young barrister named Mr.
Septimus Sessions. Oh, and it turns out we're not quite through with Reverends
Septimi. George Meredith (1828-1909) put a Rev. Septimus Barmby in his One
of Our Conquerors (1891).

John O'Keefe (1747-1833) had a hit with the play ``The Doldrum'' (like, 1798
or so, published in 1803). This sported both a Septimus (played by Mr. Quick;
sometimes you wonder which names aren't invented) and a Captain Septimus (Mr.
Middleton).

The other play I can find that features a modern Septimus (not counting the
Edwin Drood stage adaptation by Joseph Hatton, 1841-1907) is ``Pork Chops, Or A
Dream At Home'' (1860) by E. L. Blanchard, ``a Farcical Extravaganza IN ONE
ACT.'' This features a Septimus Snooks, ``a Gentleman connected with the
Press---vulgo---Penny-a-liner---with the `Life of a Vagabond' '' according to
the front matter.

Joaquin Miller (1837-1913) included the interesting rich widow of one Septimus
Boggs in a long poem called ``The Baroness of New York'' (1877). Miller was an
interesting character in his own right, so interesting that I hardly know where
to begin, so I won't.

In 1978 there was a UK TV series called ``The Body in Question,'' written and
hosted by Jonathan Miller, an interesting character in his own right (his
professional life has alternated between medicine and the theater and related
areas). In one episode the following exchange from Hard Times is
quoted:

``Are you in pain, dear mother?''

``I think there's a pain somewhere in the room,'' said Mrs. Gradgrind, ``but I
couldn't positively say that I have got it.''

Soft Error Rate. The rate of information errors not associated with
permanent damage to the machine. Soft errors are also referred to as
``recoverable.''

Ser.

Latin, Servius. A praenomen, typically abbreviated when writing
the full tria nomina.

The two other common praenomina are Sextus (Sex.) and Spurius (S. or Sp.).

sera

Spanish: `large basket' (usually without
handles). An uncommon word, at least in my experience. More common words for
basket are espuerta, canasta (for most acceptions, including the
card game, shopping basket, basket of currencies, etc.), and canasto
(usually large and lidded). (As always, usage varies by region.) In Latin
America and Andalucía, sera is a homophone of cera, `wax.'

The word seda (`silk') doesn't sound too similar to sera in
Spanish, but it could be confused as pronounced by many non-native speakers:
The letter ``d'' in Spanish is pronounced like the voiced fricative ``th'' in
the English words they, these. The noninitial single letter ``r'' in
Spanish is pronounced like the flap consonant that many or most American
English speakers use for intervocalic ``d'' (and intervocalic ``t'').
See also seránext:

será

Spanish: `will be.' More precisely,
será is the third-person singular future form of the verb
ser (`to be'). The word became well-known in Anglophone America because
of the song ``Que Será Será.'' This was Doris Day's
signature song, and there's more about all that at the
Victoria Day entry.

The song lyrics include the same phrase in English: `Whatever will be will be.'
This is almost an inspired translation. One day I should come back to this
entry and write a dissertation on the differences between what and
whatever, and the twisted ways that they do and don't map into
¿qué?, lo que, and que.

English-speakers and sloppy spellers of all tongues write the word without the
accent: ``sera.'' This spelling moves the stress to the penult.
There's actually a word with that spelling.

Solar Energy Research Institute. Name and acronym of a couple of
institutes in a couple of countries. The SERI in sunny Golden, Colorado, was a
facility of the US government. It began operating one year and one day after
the US bicentennial celebration. The following August 4, Pres. Jimmy Carter
signed The Department of Energy Organization Act, which brought the
DoE into being and brought SERI under its aegis.
In 1991, the first president Bush elevated SERI to the status of a national
laboratory and changed the name to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
(NREL).

Universiti Kebangsaan, a/k/a the National University of Malaysia, established
its SERI on July 1, 2005. Suri, the daughter of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise,
was born April 18, 2006 (except according to the National Enquirer). I
think that explains everything. Cf.SERIS.

seriousness

The 1992 book from Routledge entitled Nationalisms and Sexualities
-- don't laugh yet, that's not the punch line! -- was edited by Andrew Parker,
Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger. Here is the first sentence of
the preface:

Nationalisms and Sexualities was first imagined at Eve
Sedgwick's house in Amherst, Massachusetts during a pajama party attended by
the editors and several members of the editorial board of the newly-launched
journal Genders.

That was the punch line.

A ``historic international conference'' resulted, held at Harvard June 16-18,
1989, sponsored by the Harvard Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, the
Radcliffe Project on Interdependence, and Amherst College. I was kind of
expecting something like ``Amherst College Initiative on Gendered Discourses of
the Other,'' but it just says ``Amherst College.'' I guess they don't believe
in compartmentalizing that stuff. They let all the fine individual
participations of the college redound to the enhanced reputation of the whole.

Just in case you were thinking of inviting me to your next
conference-brainstorming session, I think you should know: I sleep naked.

SERIS

Solar Energy Research Institute of
Singapore. Singapore's national institute for applied solar energy
research, organized within the National University of Singapore
(NUS) and sponsored by NUS and Singapore's National
Research Foundation (NRF) through the Singapore Economic Development Board
(EDB). I'm pretty much quoting here; I don't plan to sort out what that means,
very precisely. It troubles me when a scientific or engineering research
institute's main Internet presence appears to be on Facebook. Cf.SERI.

SEROCO, SeRoCo

SEars, ROebuck, and COmpany. Abbreviation popular about a century ago, and
an honest-to-God acronym, or notarikon at
least.

Système Électronique de Renseignements par
Téléphone. French for
`Electronic system for information by telephone.' Not just any information --
tax information. Information about Canadian taxes, in French, from the the folks who collect it. Sounds like a conflict of
interest to me.
``Électronique'' means that the answerer is electronic. You already
knew that the phone connection was electronic. No, I don't know the number
(check
here). In English, the service is T.I.P.S.

Dave Barry explains about the US version of this telephone, uh, service
that it's just no good. They tell you to write clearly and not make arithmetic
mistakes, instead of telling you how to cheat without getting caught.

SERVE

Secure Electronic Registration and
Voting Experiment. An Internet voting system developed by the Pentagon for
U.S. citizens overseas to participate in elections and primaries. The
experiment was originally scheduled to run sometime in 2004, at least by the
time of the national elections on November 2. In the initial experiment, only
selected counties were to participate. (I.e., citizens overseas would
have been able to participate in the experiment only if their legal residence
was in certain counties.) SERVE was announced in January 2004 and immediately
criticized by computer security experts. Four members of a ten-member
peer-review Pentagon committee urged cancellation of the program. On February
4, the Pentagon announced that it was cancelling it.

Why was it the Pentagon that was doing this? Because the relevant agency (FVAP) is within the Department of Defense (DoD). During the Florida vote-counting morass in 2000,
it was widely reported that most Americans voting from abroad were in or with
the military. In January 2004, when SERVE was publicized, it was reported that
of the six million U.S. voters living overseas, most are members of the
military or their relatives. Although statistics about Americans abroad are
strikingly uncertain, it is clear that these claims, at least, are false. See
the FVAP entry for more.

service learning

Learning while, or by, performing a community service. Also called
community-based leaning (CBL, q.v.).
Performing a service for an individual who might be a member of a community is
considered community service, so community is basically just a
meaningless feel-good word.

serving size

This is a food-science term for the amount of food that you are served or
that you serve yourself during a single food-consumption episode. Let's
examine this concept with an example: Lindt-brand ``Lindor Truffles.'' These
are fine, moderately priced chocolates without truffles. They are sold in
chocolate-bar-shaped packages containing little square chocolate pieces with
smooth filling. The squares are arranged in a two-dimensional array: six rows
of three chocolate squares each, or three rows of six-piece columns, depending
on how you hold the box. We're going to ignore oblique possibilities and just
think rectilinearly. I can tell that your mouth is watering right now.

According to the theory of relativity, these six-rows-of-three-piece-columns or
three-rows-of-six-piece-columns compass equal quantities of chocolate (in the
``rest frame,'' if you haven't opened the box yet). A separate calculation
shows that this quantity is eighteen (18) chocolate pieces. This number is
confirmed at three separate places on the outside of the box -- which makes
sense: once you can read the inside of the box, you can probably tell how many
pieces there are by the methodology of direct inspection. This has to be what
people mean when they talk about ``thinking outside the box.''

Flipping the box over carefully, we find an information region labeled
``Nutrition Facts.'' (There is separate text, bearing the rubric
``Ingredients,'' which evidently does not contain nutrition facts, in some
application of that term.) In order to state the nutrition facts clearly, it
is necessary to state the nutrition content using intensive measures (in the
thermodynamic sense) rather than extensive ones.

``Serving size'' is the food-science concept that makes this intellectual
transformation possible. Intensive quantities are stated in ordinary extensive
units like grams, but these quantities represent ``amount per serving.'' In
our chosen example (Lindt-brand Lindor Truffles), the serving size is

[Information Facts: Normally I don't bother, but in this entry it seemed
apropos to indicate the ``information serving size.'' Studies indicate that at
approximately this point, give or take a word or two, readers pause to digest
the information so far consumed. One serving of glossary entry contains 16% of
the recommended daily value (DV) of information for
the sort of adult who consumes 2000 bytes per day.]

39 grams. Given that the net weight in the package is 100 g, a serving
size of 39 might seem a bit fussy. After all, they might have chosen a
serving size of 40 g, which divides evenly into two packages. (Don't tell
me you selfishly bought only one!) I'm sure that Lindt & Sprüngli GmbH catches a lot of flack for this, and I'm here to
tell you it is just completely unfair. A sober reappraisal of the relevant
nutrition fact -- ``Serv. Size 7 pieces (39g)'' -- suggests that

You know how some sites say ``under construction''? Here you actually get to
see the construction underway.

SocioEconomic Status. Very common sociology acronym. Since it's got a familiar
name, you can assume you know what it means instead of thinking about how vague
the concept is.

SES

Société Européenne des Satellites.

SES

Spin Echo Spectroscopy.

SESAP

Surgical Education and Self-Assessment Program. Administered by the
Committee on Continuing Education of the American College of Surgeons (ACS).

SESPA

Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action. Defunct. See
the SftP entry, which is still breathing.

SET

Secure Electronic (financial) Transaction.

SET

Securities Exchange of
Thailand. That was the name when trading began on the SET in 1975. In
1991, the name changed to ``Stock Exchange of Thailand.'' Actually, the name
didn't change on its own; the name was changed to ``Stock Exchange of
Thailand.'' It just goes to show how important the passive voice is. If the
antojo ever siezes me, to research up any real information about SET and
slather it in a neat layer over this section of the esses, I'll probably put it
at the otherSET entry.

Somebody or other got killed. Not that this means anything. Just don't
stop the Peace Process. Don't even think about it.

SETI

Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. This is something
NASA does. (In Britain, this is what NASA do,
but an American who construes a collective noun as a plural just sounds like
one of those over-correcting bastards who insists that
data be construed plural.)

Actually, it's not something NASA does anymore, since Congress cut funding in
1993. The project has been continued with private contributions -- see
the SETI Institute and
the SETI League.
Listen to Coast-to-Coast AM long enough, and you're
bound to hear about it.

In the SBF, we conduct a very similar enterprise, which is the Search for Extra
Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). It's been suggested that Hungary might be a good place to search.

Back in the 1990's, I think,
you could let your computer
participate in the search in its spare time while you were away. It would
help search for less-likely-to-be-noise patterns in the electronic noise of
outer space. (The link is dead, okay? Now you can use your personal computer,
when you're not using it for anything else and even when you are, to search for
the search program of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence on Earth,
or cyberspace or wherever.)

Settled Fact

A false belief based on arguments forgotten before they could be refuted.

Ha-ha! Just kidding! Of course: everyone knows that belief is not based on
reasoned argument. Not even true belief.

SEU

Single Event Upset. Come-on! Take it
like a man! If you want to be the alpha male, you've got to be able to
take the alpha particle hits.

SEU

Smallest Executable Unit.

Well, there are always arguments about whether viruses are alive, yet there's
no question but that you can kill them anyway.

SEU

Survey of English Usage.

Seven Habits of Higthly Effective foobar, The

No longer a book title, not even just a book series, but a title meme.
There's nothing left to do but contemplate future titles.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Nuns. Wait until
Sunday.

The Seven Habits of Highly Defective Genes.

The Seven Hobbits of Highly Effective Mythology.

Seven Sisters

Seven prestigious private colleges founded as women's colleges. Only some
of them are ``sister schools'' of Ivy League colleges.

Radcliffe College was in Cambridge along with Harvard, but was absorbed into
Harvard in the 1970's. All that remains is a Radcliffe Institute (research
into Women's studies, um, broadly defined) and annual campaigns for
money from Radcliffe alumnae. (See the seriousness entry for a sample of the
Institute's good work.) Barnard is across the street from Columbia.

Wellesley is a dozen miles from Harvard
and Bryn Mawr a dozen miles from the University of Pennsylvania. Vassar
College (in Poughkeepsie, NY) and Cornell (in Ithaca, NY) are both less than
half a dozen miles from nowhere, but they're different nowheres, nowheres near
each other, no way. Well, Vassar is a bit over 30 miles from West Point.
Basically, this sister has no big brother.
Mount Holyoke, the eldest sister, and
Smith College, are both in Massachusetts.

``Trangeneration,'' a documentary series that aired on the Sundance Channel
in September 2005, featured four transgender students described as ``two women
and two men.'' One of the students, Lukas, was transitioning from female to
male while attending Smith College. I do not know why Lukas decided to attend
Smith College, but I can see it from at least a couple of angles. It also
means that anyone who looks at his résumé now will notice a sort
of discrepancy. (Another student, a Filipino scholarship student at UCLA,
bought hormones from street dealers for a fraction of the price of medical
estrogen. Estrogen is available as a street drug? Why order from Canada when
discount pricing is as close as the nearest inner city?)

According to a 2005.09.15 article in the San Francisco Chronicle (byline
Reyhan Harmanci), ``legal and social pressure has resulted in administrative
changes at many schools. The main issues are in the places where normative
gender is enforced -- restrooms, on-campus housing, sports teams.
Gender-neutral restrooms have become the standard at Wesleyan University,
Oberlin, University of Massachusetts, the University
of Chicago, Sarah Lawrence
College, the University of New Hampshire, Beloit College in Wisconsin and
several other schools.'' This is gonna wreak havoc with Title IX.

Bryn Mawr's grad school has been integrated, but the undergraduate college is
still all-female. I'll just keep adding facts at random.

The two other common praenomina are Servius (Ser.) and Spurius (S. or Sp.).
You say you don't know what a praenomen is? Well shame on you!
All you had to do was ask and be berated! (We're trying to reproduce the
traditional Latin pedagogical experience here, see?) It's explained at the tria nomina entry.

A name to watch out for is Sextus Empiricus, a physician and Skeptic
philosopher of the second century BC. A Greek who may have taught in Rome or
Alexandria, he is normally called Sextus, with that being taken as his
name in the Greek style, Latinized. Then
Empiricus is regarded as an epithet referring to the fact that he was a
member of the ``Empirical school'' of physicians (although he did not agree
completely with that school). However, and particularly with the little that
we know of him, it cannot be ruled out Empiricus was his gens or family
name.

I just want to mention Siprotes and Teresias. The goddess Artemis
performed a sex-change operation on the Cypriot Siprotes after he saw her
bathing. I suppose you could call that an elegant solution. Better than what
she did to Actaeon, anyway (described at the ARTF entry).

I only said I wanted to mention Teresias.

You know, the trouble with a love letter is that you put a lot of work into
writing it and making it personal and everything, but after all that effort
you send it to very few people. Fortunately, I have a place to deposit such
subliterary odds'n'ends. (This glossary.)

To Miss X------:
I know a bold woman like you can have any boy she
wants, and I know you know you are a ``man-eater.'' I
see you with other boys -- my rivals -- and I always
check them out. What makes *them* so special? Why
not me?
When that day I long for comes, when you finally turn
your gaze upon me and I quickly glance down at my
knees, a smile playing at the corner of my blushing
cheek, you know you will have me.
But I don't want to be just another notch in your
lipstick case.
The guys you've been with before, they're just ``loose
men.'' They only want you for ... for what's between
your legs! *I'm not that kind of guy.* Oh sure, I
think about, you know, down there. Nice guys have
needs too. But I want you to respect me after we....
(Giggle.)
I'm not like those empty-headed boys you've known. I'm
a quality person. I have serious interests, I watch
Animal Planet, I read magazines. That's why I look up
to you, not just because you're on top. I'm the kind
of guy who can appreciate the woman that you are --
your education, your seriousness, your sense of humor,
your income.
xxxooo (heart) xxoo,
your Secret Admirer.
P.S. I want to have your baby!

sex change operations

They should never be performed, because they create linguistic chaos.
Oh -- the unbearable, unendurable emotional stress of deciding among he, she,
and it! But that's not all! Proper academic citation becomes intolerably
burdensome. For example, I just read this: ``Ever since the publication of
Donald (now Deirdre) McCloskey's The Rhetoric of Economics in 1985,
questions concerning the material basis for culture have focused on the
motivated rhetoric of such putatively descriptive accounts....'' Well, at
least there's something interestingly self-referential about that.

sex in space

In outer space, that is. It's a moderately popular topic of
fiction, as indicated by
this Wikipedia article.
They don't mention a pornographic film called The Uranus Project. It is
reported
(here) that
scenes were filmed on a Russian research plane capable of simulating
microgravity (parabolic flightpaths), but the scenes I saw were apparently,
um, performed in ordinary (non-freefall) conditions.

A much tamer and lamer cinematic treatment of sex in space occurs in
Moonraker. Roger
Moore (as James Bond) and Lois Chiles (Bond Girl ``Dr. Holly Goodhead'' -- Ian
Fleming was a satirist, you know) are shown post coitus in an orbiting
space shuttle. They are obviously floating in zero gravity, but some
mysterious force causes her hair and the sheet covering them to hang earthward.

Astronauts may have sex on the ground, of course, or in bed if they prefer.
Apparently this is something that shuttle astronauts Lisa Nowak and Bill
Oefelein did, for a couple of years while they were married to other people.
Then they broke up and Oefelein took up with Colleen Shipman. On February 5,
2007, Nowak drove 900 miles from her home in Houston to Orlando, Florida, where
she confronted Shipman. The confrontation led to charges of attempted
kidnapping, burglary with assault and battery against Nowak. Nowak -- at least
as of as May 2007 -- and Oefelein were in the Navy. Ironically enough, but not
ironically enough to merit a spot in our
Nomenclature is destiny entry, Shipman
is not in the Navy. She's an Air Force Captain. I guess you could say it was
an inter-service rivalry.

News reports described Nowak's 900-mile drive as ``bizarre,'' apparently just
because she wore an astronaut diaper so she wouldn't have to stop. Her lawyer
has insisted that she didn't wear a diaper, that those were left over in the
car from an earlier trip with a baby along.

sex sells

That old saw was my first thought when I opened Bull Cook and Authentic
Historical Recipes and Practices Volume II Plus Famous Restaurants and Night
Clubs of the World (Herter's Inc., 1968), by George Leonard Herter and
Berthe E. Herter. The ``Introduction'' is a few lines at the bottom of the
title-and-copyright-and-introduction page, quoting... George Leonard Herter:

``People who honestly appreciate gastronomic miracles or in other words really
good cooking never worry about their weight while they eat, anymore
than a man worries about his heart while having sexual intercourse
with a good looking woman.''

[Punctuation and the rest sic.]

But that isn't what prompted my thought of the old saw, because I didn't notice
the ``introduction.'' I noticed the facing page, page 3, which begins the
Meats section with ``Toulouse Lautrec Chicken.'' An illustration
dominates the page. Its caption begins ``This painting is called `Friendship'
by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec'' and ends ``[t]he name of this painting is
probably one of the greatest understatements ever made.'' The painting shows a
reclining couple facing each other; she is topless. At first you don't even
notice her hand. (Either it's horribly deformed or that part of the painting
wasn't very carefully executed.)

sexting

Present participle of the verb to sext, a blend of sex and
text. Sexting is an application of texting technology and a perversion of the genteel
practice of phone sex.

Early in January 2007, when she was in a twelve-step program for her
``addiction issues,''
Lindsay
Lohan spent a lot of time sexting Brody Jenner. Brody, the son of Olympian
Bruce Jenner, has achieved fame by appearing on a reality show and dating
celebutantes. At the time, he had just signed a deal to be a ``spokesman'' for
Scope mouthwash. Was he supposed to say things, or just open his mouth? When
asked by <Usmagazine.com> to comment on the Lohan story, Jenner said,
``Sorry, dude. I don't text and tell.'' Chivalry is not dead.

sexual politics

Makes estranged bedfellows.

sexual self-identification

Remember, you can't spell sexual self-identification without
cation. See? It's all about chemistry.

sex work

PC euphemism for prostitution. The respected
profession of industrious STD vectors. It's
a lifestyle choice and it's a form of slavery too! I suppose the modern term
for a brothel should ``a sex works.''

Seyfert

Carl K. SEYFERT (1911-60). In 1943, he drew attention
(in ApJ, vol. 97, pp. 28ff) to a class
of galaxies (now called Seyfert galaxies, or Seyferts) characterized by bright
compact cores (now called Seyfert nuclei) that show strong emission in the
infrared.

Special Economic Zone. A term used by the government of India since 2000,
for regions where tax abatements and investments in infrastructure are intended
to encourage manufacturing investment.

The US Congress once designated the entire Commonwealth of Puerto Rico a
special economic zone, in fact if not in name, and exempted companies from
paying taxes on profits earned from manufacturing there. They sez the system
was gamed, and Congress rescinded the tax break in 2006. But after that many
companies shuttered their manufacturing plants in PR, and they sez it hurt the
economy there. I sez you can't have it all both ways; if rescinding the tax
break hurt the economy, it suggests the tax break was helping it (however
inefficiently). That wasn't the only problem, but in any case, as of 2016, PR
has been on the brink of bankruptcy (a legal remedy that isn't legally
available to US territories such as PR -- yet or possibly ever) for a couple of
years.

SF

San Francisco. Be forewarned: the locals consider ``Frisco'' pejorative.

I was first rather pointedly informed of this fact in 1975, but it goes back at
least a bit further. Here's an item from a novel published in 1946 (set in
1944 or so; details at the BF entry):

``Wake up,'' someone was saying. ``We're letting down.'' It was
broad daylight in the plane, late morning or early afternoon.
``Down where?'' he asked, and he pulled himself together.
``Frisco.''
``Don't call it that,'' Bob Tasmin said. ``Call it San Francisco.
The citizens don't like it.''

Oh look, here's something: at one point, the Italian consulate in San Francisco
had the domain name <italconsfrisco.org>. I guess they found out that
might not be popular.

You know, people from Cincinnati take no offense at ``Cinci'' (also spelled
Cincy) and people from Philadelphia don't mind ``Philly.'' A clerk I
spoke with at a Turkey Hill store in Wind Gap, PA, called Pennsylvania
``Pennsy.'' (That's pronounced, and less often spelled, Pencey or
Pency. You remember that at the beginning of Catcher in the Rye,
Holden is flunking out of his latest prep school? That was Pencey Prep.)

Hold the phone -- this just in! In response to threatening, um, I mean to
characteristically polite email from many beautiful San Franciscisciscans, I am
prepared to reveal my recent discovery of the true objection to ``Frisco.''
It's to avoid confusion with Frisco, Colorado, and Frisco, Texas. So
considerate!

Maybe we should use ``Frisky'' instead of ``Frisco.'' Someone almost tried
that, in fact. I'm thinking of Henry Glover (``with'' Morris Levy --
co-writing or maybe just co-collecting royalties), who wrote the words and
music for ``California Sun.''

This charted for the Rivieras just as the British Invasion hit and changed
everything.
``California Sun'' was a very representative American song of the era that
closed then -- almost an instant antique. I think it was released in 1964; it
entered the Top 40 on February 1, 1964 and stayed nine weeks, reaching #5. The
Beatles' ``I Want To Hold Your Hand'' had its American release on December 26,
1963, and first appeared on the Top 40 in the January 25, 1964, edition of
Billboard.
There was a historic mob scene at JFK
International Airport when the Beatles landed on February 7, and when they
appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show two days later, they could hardly be heard
over the screams of their fans. (Eventually, crowd noise was a major factor in
the Beatles' decision to stop touring.) ``I Want To Hold Your Hand'' spent 14
weeks in the Top 40, including seven weeks at #1. For the week of April 4, the
Beatles owned the top five slots of the Top 40.

(On the web, I've read alternative reports of the chart career of ``California
Sun,'' such as that it was held at #2 or toppled from #1 by the Beatles' first
American hit. There must be some basis for these reports, but I don't know
what it is. I don't think it's the Billboard competitor Cashbox. The #5
ranking and associated dates are from the 7th and 8th editions (which were
ready to my hand) of Joel Whitburn's The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits.
What has been popularly known as the ``Top 40'' since mid-1958 is the top 40
slots of the Billboard ``Hot 100,'' based on both sales and airplay.)

The Rivieras, you'll want to know, formed when the members were in high school
in South Bend, Indiana, and had some success playing clubs in the area. They
were variously described as playing surf, garage, teen, and frat rock.
``California Sun'' was their one hit. There were a number of personnel
changes, partly caused by the draft, and they
broke up in 1966. (Not for good -- they got together again in the 80's.)
Anyway, that Glover song includes these lines:

Well the girls are frisky in ol' 'Frisco --
A pretty little chick wherever you go.

SF

{ Science Fiction | Science Fantasy | Speculative Fiction }.

The ECLIPSE website hosts areas for Doom, Dr. Who, Captain Power (Captain
Who?), and Babylon 5. In 1998 ECLIPSE won a lot of web awards, but it's
getting tougher all the time.

Traditionally, a distinction is observed between SF, meaning ``hard-core''
Science Fiction, and sci-fi, which may be more
fantasy-oriented, with ``fantasy'' often in the sense of wish
fulfillment. However, non-SF sci-fi enthusiasts by and large do not
cooperate in maintaining this (sometimes loose) distinction.

SF

Signal Frequency.

SF

Small Forward. Basketball position. Seems to
me, if you're gonna shoot, forward is the safest way. Oh wait, that was
small forward, not shooting forward. I was thinking of SG. Small forwards are often as short as 6'7".
Regular old forwards are often that short too. I guess that's not what they
mean by small. They're probably referring to hand span -- yeah, that's it.

The italics on the not-limited clause serve to highlight the differences of
opinion that necessarily exist on the question of what exactly qualifies as a
``snack food.'' The book Snack Food (1990), edited by R. Gordon Booth,
includes in the category of snack foods pickles, sauces, and salted jellyfish.
Somewhat at the opposite extreme is Snack Food Technology (1993) by
Samuel A. Matz, (details at the snack food
entry). Matz prefers to exclude the three aforementioned items as well as
candy, although he concedes in his preface that ``a good case could be
made for including all such materials in the wider category `snacks'.''

Matz's laudable fastidiousness leads to admirable caution in the case of granola, but also to excessive indecision. For
example, the introduction of chapter 18, on ``Meat-Based Snacks,'' begins

There are several snacks composed primarily of raw
materials derived from animals [he's not thinking of milk-chocolate-coated caramel here]. Almost every
consumer would agree that fried puffed bacon rinds are snacks [hadn't we
better take a survey?], because their texture, appearance, and flavor resemble
those characteristics of puffed or fried cereal snacks [he must be thinking
mouthfeel here; I don't recall pork rinds tasting like cocoa puffs], and they
are sold in portion-size pouches for eating mostly between regularly scheduled
meals. ...

(Emphasis added.)

From various fortune files, here's

Karlson's Theorem of Snack Food Packages

For all P, where P is a package of snack food, P is a SINGLE-SERVING
package of snack food.

What's this ``regularly scheduled meals'' business? I take my food item when I'm hungry. As the French say:
Consume mass quantities!

Society for the Furtherance of Critical Philosophy.
They could have used ``advanced'' and had a vowel to work with, but I take this
philosophically: if you insist on ``Critical Philosophy'' as part of your name,
you're not likely to get a pronounceable acronym with less than two syllables
(``SACPhil,'' say).

SFD

Shear-Force Diagram. A graph of shear force (i.e., of force
perpendicular to the beam axis) as a function of position along a beam. Of
course, ``force perpendicular to the beam axis'' is locally two-dimensional.
Also, the shear force bends the axis a bit (see
BMD for no clarification), making the shear force
three-dimensional overall. These things make it difficult to represent the
shear force in a mere two-dimensional diagram, sure, but I'm sure you can
handle it. What are you, a mathematician? Use your tough engineer's skull to
hammer through a solution.

There is membership for individuals, students (who get a discount relative to
individuals), and institutions. The principal (and only testable) criterion
for membership is subscription to the quarterly journal French Historical
Studies (FHS). It's pretty inexpensive, but if
you're homeless, where would they deliver? I guess they're just not interested
in serving the French Historical Studies needs of the North American homeless
community.

The similar British organization is the Society for the Study of French History
(SSFH).

sphygmomanometer

I jest halve this entrée hear sow I can fine it when I cant spell it.
If you're spelling is bad, you look stupid even thought your a genius.
Spell-checkers dissolve that problem.

When I saw the headline ``Rolls-Royce in Talks
with SFO over Bribery Concerns,'' I supposed SFO stood for ``Senior
Financial Officer,'' in parallel with CFO. But no,
it stands for the UK's Serious Fraud Office. Perhaps it also stands for the
UK's Silly Fraud Office. Her Majesty's government often seems Monty
Pythonesque.

Apparently there have been ``allegations of malpractice'' in Indonesia and
China. There might be fraud and there might not, but judging from what I know
of Latin America, the fact of bribery does not imply fraud. I mean, at least
in Latin America, everyone knows what the deal is, so no one is really
deceived. So bribery isn't fraudulent -- at worst it's just a little bit coy.

SFOAE

Stimulus-Frequency OtoAcoustic Emmission[s] (OAE).
[Component of] OAE's evoked by sinusoidal stimulus, at the applied frequency.
Can be detected by varying the stimulus frequency and probing for a response
at earlier frequency.

SFOR

Stabilization
FORce. Comprised of NATO troops mostly,
about 1/4 US, deployed to enforce some parts of the 1996 Dayton Accords
that ended the Bosnian war.

Initially deployed for a nominal one-year mission, they're digging in for
the long haul. Gilligan's Island
was a sitcom launched by a three-hour tour.

Science For The People. Boston-based journal ``for antiwar
analysis and
activity.'' Founded in the 1960's by the now-defunct SESPA (Scientists and
Engineers for Social and Political Action) to oppose the Vietnam War, it
continues (well, continued, at least into the late 1980's) to ``challenge
military applications of science and technology.''

While a lot of the leftist ``underground'' newspapers disappeared along with
the antiwar movement when active US involvement ended, many academic journals
of the left, founded in a similar spirit, have survived as alternatives to the
perceived orthodoxy when their disciplines. Examples besides the SftP (which
suggests soft porn to my filthy mind) are Radical Teacher, Insurgent
Sociologist (a newsletter turned journal which dumped the activism and
became Critical Sociology in 1988), Issues in Radical Therapy
(like, what kind of prosthesis
should I get after radical mastectomy?), Conspiracy, Madness Network
News,
Radical Philosopher's Newsjournal,
and Sipapu.

Among major history journals, Radical America,
Radical History Review (see MARHO), and
Socialist Revolution survived into the late 1980's, but the last renamed
itself Socialist Review.

Well, you used to shake 'em down, but
now you stop and think about your dignity!

A small two-engine commuter plane made by Saab.
In the usual configuration, most of the seating is in three-seat rows: one on
the left side of the aisle, two on the right. The flight attendant explains
that in the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure or other emergency, it may
be necessary to use the oxygen masks located under the aisle seats. The masks'
tubes are to be connected to the outlets above the seats. Strikingly, there is
only one outlet on each side, as if no provision had been made for the window
passenger on the right. It turns out that under the right-hand aisle seat,
there is a pair of masks whose common inlet tube connects to the outlet over
the right-hand seats. ``I get asked that a lot,'' says the flight attendant.
Now everyone can experience the intimacy of conjoined twins.

``Even though oxygen is flowing, the bag may not inflate.''

Please bring your tray tables and seat backs to their locked and upright
positions, and not vice versa.

If you are traveling with or seated next to a
child, put your own mask on first and then assist
the child.

If this is your final destination, may God have mercy on your soul.

Insert the metal tip into the buckle, then pull on the loose end to tighten the
belt. To release the belt, simply pull forward on the buckle. Here, let me
help you with that.

This is your last and final boarding call.
The one before was just your last boarding call. Yeah, it can get confusing.

Because of the short duration of this flight, we will not have beverage
service; however, if I can help in any way, please do not hesitate to call me
by pressing the yellow button above your seat.

``Yes, could I have a warm soda, and some
peanuts and small pretzels in a
steel-reinforced, rip-stop kevlar bag, please?''

Secretary General. A multilingual shorthand specialist who takes the
minutes at Security Council meetings, I guess. The one before Kofi Annan was
Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Boutros is the form of `Peter' used by Coptic
(Egyptian) Christians. (From the Greek
Petros. Also, Ghali is an Arabic word that means `expensive,' but in
this context I imagine it means or meant either something like `worthy, valued'
or `rich.') Boutros-Ghali tried to win a second term as SG, against the
opposition of the US, which -- as a permanent member of the Security Council --
has veto power over the selection.
Originally, Boutros promised not to run for a second term, but this is the kind
of promise rarely held against politicians. Under his leadership, the UN staff
achieved notorious new heights of bureaucratic fear and sycophancy. Well,
we gave Kurt Waldheim two terms, what the hey!

If it seems odd to you that the Coptic form of Peter should begin in a
b sound rather than a p sound, see the BATA
Shoe Museum entry.

SG

Semiconductor-Grade (semiconductor material).

SG

Shooting Guard. Basketball position that sounds like something happened at
the bank. The other guards get to shoot too.

SG

Silicate Glass.

S&G

Simon and Garfunkel. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel originally performed as
Tom and Jerry. They broke up in 1970 reportedly amicably and have done some
reunion performances. It is widely reported that they can barely stand each
other, and therefore almost equally widely believed that their claims to the
contrary are only for show. Still crazy after all these years. There's an
enormous S&G FAQ, a legacy of
alt.music.paul-simon in
the days when writing newsgroup FAQ's was popular. Unfortunately, and quite
surprisingly, as of August 2007 I can't find any copy of it on the web. To
judge from the number of links to now-defunct websites for Paul Simon, Art
Garfunkel, or both, it seems there's been a severe fall-off in interest in
them or their music in the twenty-first century. Here are a few certified live
(by me) as of this month:

<Paul-Simon.Info>.
There's an Animation checkbox at the lower right that you can unclick
to reduce the graphics to a merely excessive annoyance.

SG

Sorghum Grain.

SG

Spin Glass. A disordered system of spins. The typical experimental
realization is a nonmagnetic metal with a small concentration (1-5%) of
magnetic ion impurity. A typical theoretical model considers a system of
spins with a random distribution of spin couplings. (This substitutes for
the more physical RKKY model.)

Society for German
Idealism. ``The primary purpose of the Society for German Idealism is to
stimulate interdisciplinary scholarship on the philosophies of the German
idealists - chiefly but not exclusively: Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling -
and to afford an opportunity for international exchange of research on German
idealism.''

A common question posed by the name of any society ``for <foobar>'' is whether the society promotes
<foobar> or studies it -- i.e., is really a society ``for the
study of <foobar>.'' (VideUDI.)
Often common sense will resolve the ambiguity. In the case of philosophies,
one expects both meanings to be intended to some degree. That is, most
philosophers are disinclined to study a philosophical system unless they find
some element of truth in it or at least clever argumentation, so they might be
expected to promote it as well.

Conversely, you can't honestly promote a philosophy you don't study. I mean,
you could promote a combination dustmop-plunger without studying it -- you
might just use it in the living room or bathroom. It's good for
something (there's that word again) if it's any good at all. In contrast with
Swiss-Army plumbers' helpers, philosophies (probably especially idealist
philosophies) don't do anything. They don't have any moving parts, but
they're too soft to use as hammers and too thin for pillows. Navel-gazing is
the paradigmatic dog that don't hunt. Again, people: common sense.

Common sense is not something one associates with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).
Naturally, he developed a cult of slavish followers. The joke went that if the
post coach was late from Koenigsberg, the Kantians
wouldn't know what to think that day. (Kant, as I'm sure you remember now,
spent all of his life within a few miles of his hometown of Koenigsberg. He
was only intellectually wide-ranging. Late in life, he decided to take a trip
abroad, but he aborted the trip after a few minutes' riding.)

Hmmm. I never found out what the SGS stood for. It must be pretty
frustrating for people who look things up.

Oh, great: in May 1998 they changed their name to STMicroelectronics. With
rebus names like this, it's no wonder the old acronym/initialism distinction
broke down. Now I'll never find out what it stood for. Part of the
SGS Group of companies.

Sandy Hook Beach. On the New Jersey coast, really quite unnecessarily
close to New York.

SH

Postal code for Schleswig-Holstein, one of the sixteen states
(Länder) of the German Federal Republic (FRG). [Like most of the country information in this
glossary, Germany's is at the domain code .de.]

The state's area is 15,771 sq. km.
Its population was 2,554,000 by the census of 1987, estimated at 2,759,000 for
1997.

SH

Second-Harmonic.

s.h.

Semester Hour[s].

Sh.

Shakespeare. The abbreviation is reserved for only this meaning, because
of its salience and utility in all fields of endeavor.

S&H

Shipping and Handling. Seems to me it ought to be ``H&S.''
In the Chicago dialect of Mexican,
for example, it's Manejo y Envio.

SH

Shit Happens. Internet usage.

SH

Southern Hemisphere. Climatological usage.

S&H

Thomas Alexander Sperry and Shelley B. Hutchinson. S&H Green Stamps
were a promotional gimmick intended to build customer loyalty to the stores
that distributed them. It was like coupon-clipping in reverse. You got a
little booklet (for free!) to stick them in, and with every purchase you
received a few green stamps, about 25mm high by 15 mm wide. Scraping in the
darker corners of my memory, I think I remember that there were also some
yellow stamps, double-wide, that you could use to fill two rectangles in the
(free!) booklet. Once you filled a booklet (1200 stamps) you could
redeem the booklet for stuff, or you could accumulate a few booklets-full for
stuff that you would actually want. The stuff was in the S&H catalog. The
past is a foreign country. (Especially if emigrate.) As recently as the late
1960's or early 1970's, the local A&P
supermarket distributed them. We only ever went there to buy coffee beans and
have them fine-ground at the checkout counter, so over the years we might have
accumulated stamps enough to redeem for two eight-track cassettes or a paper
cup.

Green Stamps were introduced in 1896 by the Sperry and Hutchinson Company, and
originally used by Merchants Supply Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Green stamps are not as popular as they once were. In fact, they've completely
disappeared. Unfortunately, the S&H Co. survived, and now markets
``S&H greenpoints: The Next
Generation of Loyalty Marketing.'' According to the greenpoints site, the year 1964 was
milestone:

The S&H catalog becomes the largest single publication in the US. S&H
prints 3 times as many stamps as the US Post Office, and enough catalogs to
circle the earth 1 1/2 times!

Also ``by the 1960's, S&H was the largest purchaser of consumer products in
the world.''

SH

Spherical Harmonic[s] (n.) or Spherical-Harmonic (adj.).

Once, ``Tesseral Harmonic'' was a common name as well.

SHA

Secondary Heads Association. A UK organization
for heads of secondary schools, rather than for the secondary heads of schools.

SHAB

SBF Hall of Acronym Fame

CCLRC
Recognized for containing the words Council and Councils
in its expansion.

A term intermediate in connotation between ``living in sin,'' and
``roommates.''

You know, boys and girls, there was a time when a certain natural biological
phenomenon, consequent to the one not actually described in any of the
preceding three terms, was considered too indelicate to name directly. To
be blunt, by the standards of that time, the word pregnant was
considered coarse, even obscene. As recently as the 1890's, I think, the
standard term was ``in a family way.'' In the fifties, polite incoherent
references to rabbit fatality were standard, and
``with child'' was still a bit, mmm, direct. (Sex education was conducted
entirely in Morse Code. That's why boys learned Morse Code. It's no
coincidence that codeless licensing has become the
norm as the moral fiber of our nation has gone to hell.) Intransitive
``expecting'' was a common expression. Depends where you lived, of course.
Did you notice the comment on embarazo near the end of the TP entry?

SHAEF

Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces.

SHAFR

Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Founded in 1976,
about 1900 members in 1998.

shakai

Japanese: `society.' Borrowed from European root; first attested 1877.
Cf.seken.

shake

An opaque, highly non-Newtonian fluid. Available in restaurants.

[Among the old Los Alamos `device' makers] a convenient unit of
time equal to 10-8 seconds. An eternity to modern
pulsed laser.

Shania Twain and Buddy Holly

Two exponents of hiccup singing. Hear, for example, ``Man! I Feel Like
A Woman!'' and anything, respectively.

When I'm trying to figure out which door to take, I always have to remember
this fact about concrete nouns named on doors: in other cases the signs name
what you can get inside, on a public restroom it names what you can take
inside.

Name for a metrical pattern, rarely associated any more with those words.

I always assumed that two bits (25 cents) had
covered both the shave and the haircut. Maybe it once did, but here's a
relevant item from The Niles Daily Star (of
Niles, Michigan). It was front-page news on
Saturday, August 12, 1933: ``Many Niles Barbers Revise Price Charge'':

Many Niles barber shops have adopted a price schedule of 25 cents for shaves
and 35 cents for haircuts. The Master Barbers' association has submitted a
code calling for a 25 cent shave and a 50 cent haircut, which the local barbers
had agreed to adopt. But many have found that 50 cents for a haircut is
considered exorbitant by old customers, and have reduced the price.

In the same newspaper on the same day, ``Cleaners Raise Prices'' only made page
2:

The wearing apparel cleaners of Niles have made a slight increase in their
prices to correspond with increases in overhead costs of boxes, bags, and other
supplies [no mention of soap!] ... Cleaners in South Bend, Benton Harbor, St.
Joseph and other surrounding towns have already advanced their prices. The
National Industrial Recovery Act [NIRA,
q.v., which was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1935] code for
cleaners has not yet been put into effect but with the increase in prices the
cleaners will observe the NRA blanket code for wages and hours.

SHAZAM

Solomon's wisdom, Hercules strength, Atlas um... maps? -- hard to read --
Zeus power, Achilles courage, Mercury's speed! Apostrophes as in the image! I
read it off of
this defunct site before I got my glasses! Tough luck for you, huh?!

Sex Hormone-Binding Globulin. Also called steroid-binding protein (SBP). Found
in both males and females. Seems to depend on body fat. Regulates metabolic
clearance rate of steroid hormones from blood plasma by controlling their
effective concentration. Each dimer binds one molecule of steroid. Specific
for 5-alpha-dihydrotestosterone and testosterone.

SHBT

Single-Heterostructure Bipolar Transistor. Term equivalent to
HBT in conventional sense, but used to distinguish
from (exclude) Double-Heterostructure BJT's.

SHC

Spontaneous Human Combustion. It would not have been beneath my dignity
to invent this abbreviation myself, but that was not necessary. I have a book
that's full of proof. It might have been more convincing had the authors used
a decent camera. Then again maybe not. The folks at CSICOP probably have an opinion on the subject.

Quiz question:
``Howard Coward'' would be a () good or ( ) bad idea for a name?
Now back to the entry.

The Society is dedicated to the study of Hinduism and Christianity and their
interrelationships. It seeks to create a forum for the presentation of
historical research and studies of contemporary practice, for the fostering of
dialogue and interreligious conversation,
carried forward in a spirit of openness, respect and true inquiry.

In the colorful old nondecimal British system, a pound was divided into
shillings and pence as described above, and these were abbreviated s. and d.,
for solidus and denarius, the Latin
equivalents. (I have no idea how justified these equivalences might have been
initially, but since few Roman solidi or denarii were in
circulation, it can't ever have been much of an issue.) Anyway, prices were
commonly stated using expressions like ``4 shillings 11,'' meaning 4s.11d. The
s. was necessary to separate the numbers, while the written d., like the spoken
``pence,'' was implicit. A long ess (for an explanation see esh) was originally common. As the long ess glyph went
out of use, it was replaced either by the now-standard short ess glyph or by a
forward slash, which also came to be called ``solidus.''

In most of the German states, the cognate word Schilling was used with same sense
(solidus, 12 Pfennig). In
Bavaria and Austria the situation was more complicated.

shipper

RelationSHIPPER. Someone who is more interested in the relationship
between the main characters than in the plot. A term used among fans of the
X-Files, for fans who were more interested in the relationship between Mulder
and Scully than they were in the aliens.

shipping ton

A volume unit equal to 100 cubic feet or roughly 2.83 cubic meters, and yet
another proof of the inconvenience of metric units. A shipping ton is also
called a registered ton.

ships

A few years ago, I lived in a rented house with a number of graduate
students and other genteel poor. One day I had a conversation with a housemate from a
historically seafaring nation, on what to do about the back yard, where despite
our diligent neglect, the grass had thrived to the point that it required
cutting. The conversation had already become -- shall we say --
speculative, when suddenly the conversation took an unexpected turn.

Me: Sheeps? Sheep! You #%#%!*-ing *@&^#%-ous *$%@^#*! The plural of
sheep is sheep!

``A few years ago'' above refers to 1981. An article in the 24 July 2004
New Scientist (pp. 52-3 of the
North American edition) is entitled ``The sheep that launched 1000 ships.'' It
seems that Norse ships had woolen sails. They recommend visiting the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde.

An article in the November 2, 2011, New York Times is entitled ``Sheep
Lawn Mowers, and Other Go-Getters.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/garden/sheep-lawn-mowers-and-other-go-getters.html?pagewanted=2
Japanese sheep go `boo, boo.' As a consequence of drift in the pronunciation
of the Greek alphabet, ancient Greek sheep now go
`vee, vee.' (For more on this, kindly proceed to the entry on the letter
ni.)

At the beginning of Ivanhoe, Scott explains that after the Norman
conquest the Saxons still herded the sheep and cattle, but the Normans ate
the mutton and beef. Hence Germanic words for the animal names, and Romance
names for the food names. Linguists are not convinced.

Social Health Maintenance Organization. I know what you're thinking, you
filthy-minded person, because it takes one to know one. No, it's apparently
not an HMO for people with social diseases.

You want to know what it really means? I'm not sure I should tell you. You
might lose respect for me. I'll tell you what: I'll pass along the definition
at the
Medicare glossary, but I won't endorse it.

A special type of health plan that provides the full range of Medicare benefits
offered by standard Medicare HMOs, plus other services that include the
following:

A chain started by Alex Schoenbaum. Details in his obit, NYT 1996.12.15
pg. 37.

shooting method

In numerical analysis, ``shooting methods'' is the technically correct
term for `marching methods' applied to one-dimensional problems.

I foresee that this could cause problems when budget-line 6.1 is explained to
the top military brass.

One thing that I learned from the Moonies is that you don't try to sell the
the Brooklyn Bridge to someone from
Brooklyn. [When I was over 'their place on Bush street in San Francisco in
'79, and they were dissembling their true identity, my minder tried to explain
their putatively independent group with a ``flow chart.'' It amazed me that
they got any recruits at all. (Well, okay, they had this young woman guarding
the door, and when I was down there putting my shoes back on to leave, she
tried to persuade me to stay or come back. She was really beautiful; I guess
their recruitment efforts weren't totally inept.) More about that experience
at the Washington entry.]

Shop Talk

The short title of Shop Talk: a Writer and His Colleagues and Their
Work (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2001). A book of encounters
of various sorts between Philip Roth and other artists (writers, with the
exception of Philip Guston). Most are conversations that have been summarized
or recalled in interview form. I have quoted bits of this at half a dozen
places in this glossary. Following is the T.O.C. (beginning page number in
square brackets) with my comments to be interleaved.

A recollection of the beginning of the friendship between two
Philips, written about ten years after Philip Guston died. I milk this
chapter for the TTBOMKAB entry, and
skim off more for this research entry.
ask

Rereading Saul Bellow [139]

shop till you drop

It's NOT ``materialistic.'' It's all about dropping. It's a
particularly masochistic form of exercise, is all.
Women live longer because shopping is such good exercise.

A name for the period 1914-1991. That is, for the period beginning with
the the Great War and ending with the dissolution of
the Soviet Union. Cf.Long Nineteenth Century and
periodization. The name was proposed by
the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in his The Age of Extremes, and it
had the evident advantage of allowing him to cover an entire
twentieth-centuryish period in a book that he published in 1995.

SHOT

Society for the History Of
Technology. ``[F]ormed in 1958 to encourage the study of the development
of technology and its relations with society and culture.
An interdisciplinary organization, SHOT is concerned not only with the
history of technological devices and processes, but also with the relations
of technology to science, politics, social change, the arts and humanities,
and economics.''

Love the acronym. The year of SHOT's founding, 1958, is not exactly some
random year that it all happened to finally come together. Rather, 1958 was
the year following Sputnik -- start of the Soviet space program that first put
man and dog (not
in that order) in orbit around our little planet. It sent the US into panic,
in fear that we were quickly falling behind the Rooskies in various important
military and industrial technologies, and the government gave a big SHOT in the
arm to academic science and technology research, in large part via NSF. Funding grew about exponentially, right
through the Vietnam war, until 1970, when someone turned off the spigot, but
that's another story. At the beginning, the NSF didn't invest much in social
science. If some money was going to the social science for appearances' sake,
though, you can imagine that history of science and technology (HST) were bound to be favored.

shot noise

White noise in current of all conductors, associated with the
discreteness of charge.

should

This is not yet the entry for the modal should. I mean -- it is, or will
be, but it's, like, under construction. I'll probably write the shall entry
first anyway. I've already written the shoulds
entry. Why don't you read that? It's coming up shortly.

shoulda

Eye dialect for the nonstandard
contraction of ``should have,'' or a loose pronunciation of ``should've.''
This and similar pronunciation of other 've contractions've probably
contributed to new, near-homophone formulas like ``should of,'' ``could of,''
and ``would of.'' Of course, shoulda might of been a fat-finger for
shoulds. Looks like in error
n e way.

shoulds

Not the third-person singular conjugation of the modal should, but
the plural form of the noun should.

Nouning the parts of speech most reluctant to be nouned seems to be a habit
peculiar to psychiatrists and psychologists. Freud did it with singular
personal pronouns (videid).
(You know, it's nothing but sheer declensional luck that it construes
out properly here in Latin too.)

Wayne W. Dyer, a doctor of psychology, wrote a book called Your Erroneous
Zones (details at the F.O.O.L. entry).
In a section entitled ``The Folly of Shoulds, Musts and Oughts,'' he gasps that
``Karen Horney, the brilliant psychiatrist, has devoted an entire chapter of
Neurosis and Human Growth to this topic [please, please tell me that she also wrote about
frustrated sexual desire], and she titles it `The
Tyranny of the Should.' She comments:

The shoulds always produce a feeling of strain, which is all the greater the
more a person tries to actualize his shoulds in his behavior. . . .
Furthermore, because of externalizations, the shoulds always contribute to
disturbance in human relations in one way or another.*

Do shoulds determine much of your life? Do you feel you should
[sic] be kind to your colleagues, supportive of your spouse, helpful to your
children
and always work hard? [Then you're a Calvinist!
Oh, sorry--got carried away, I guess. I didn't mean to interrupt. Dyer
continues...] And if at any time you fail in one of these shoulds do you
berate yourself [Jewish? Catholic?] and hence take on that strain and
disturbance [flagellant?] to which Karen Horney alludes above? But perhaps
these are not your shoulds. If, in fact, they belong to others [give them
back! stealing is wrong!] and you have merely borrowed them [oh sure], then
you are musterbating. [Bad boy!]''

Hey, I just [96.10.31] attended the ND SHPE/MAES meeting, and it was impressive: newbie
self-introductions, new business, old business, four speakers, a social
chairman appointed by default, pizza before and after, chatting before
and after, all in a half hour!

The line is attributed to JFK, that Washington DC, has northern hospitality and southern efficiency.

Since this is one of the few social history entries in the glossary, it's a
good place to mention one of the few social history observations I have made.
It has to do with the NTU homepage linked above. It shows one guy with a fake
grin in the foreground and another guy half-heartedly stretching a grimace in
the background. They have their hands in their pockets, which is apparently
all they can do to keep from folding their arms across their chests. This
isn't personal, this is social. In American society, smiling is not frowned
upon. People are not assumed to be stupid just because they are happy.
Optimism is good. In personals ads (I admit that I have looked at personals
ads, okay?) the women are usually smiling, and they're not doing it to look
clueless. European women in personals ads look irritated or at best serious.
They're sophisticated to death. Cool like a gravedigger's ass. When they
smile, they often wear that fake smile of the guy on the NTU page: lips pried
or curled apart, eyes uninvolved or angry. They've forgotten what a happy
smile feels like, so they don't realize that they're practically sneering. I
don't need to read what the studies say about how happy Europeans tell posters
they are -- I know: these people demand to be disappointed. Crack a real
smile, FCOL! It won't kill you. Read the
.dk entry. Now. See also my comments on the
look at the english entry.

(Incidentally, I recognize that the, um, candid student shots are posed and
need not reflect the personalities of the models. This makes it worse: the
poses reflect what a photographer's experience accepts as normal and
acceptable.)

Studia Humaniora
Tartuensia. ``[A]n on-line journal of the Humanities. Its purpose is
to publish scholarly papers, notes and reviews embodying original research in
all areas of the Humanities.''
[Its Latin title means `Tartu Humanistic Studies.'
Tartu is the capital of Estonia; the journal is published by the Classics department of the University of Tartu.

When begun in 2000 the journal was intended as a local Estonian project, but
international contributions have been invited since May 2002.

Title lyric in a song from the movie ``42nd Street'' (1933).
More at this site.

SHV

Safe High Voltage. A kind of bayonet-action coax connector with recessed center contacts to
prevent shock hazard. Also, the ground connection is made before the center
connection, and openned after the center connection. Cf. Miniature High
Voltage (MHV) coax connectors. Both MHV and SHV are
intended to operate up to 50 MHz, but they have
non-constant impedance structure.

Salt Institute. An institute
concerned with sodium chloride. If you visit their place after a snow, maybe
you should drive there in a rented car. If you visit their website, you should
save anything you need from other browser windows and be prepared to kill the
browser process. The top-level links require password authorization but don't
say so, and it's difficult to make the password dialogue box go away once it's
popped up. (Keep clicking the Cancel button; eventually it may work.) Anyway,
the site was appallingly badly organized, with a majority of links screwed up
as of my visit in February 2007. The site does seem to have useful content.
However, this should be taken cum grano salis. Here are some useful
direct links to some numbered pages:

An FAQ,
with mostly working, mostly correct links. This might be the best
starting point.

``What is
the Salt Institute?'' (It's ``a non-profit association of salt
producers (manufacturers) founded in 1914.'' It claims to be ``the
world's foremost source of authoritative information about salt (sodium
chloride) and its more than 14,000 known uses.''

``The Salt
Industry.'' About 240 million tons were sold in 2005, and market
is growing slowly (about 1.5% annually). Some salt production is
``captive'': it's produced as an intermediate in chemical manufacture
and never reaches market as salt.
In 2003, 37% of salt
that did reach market was purchased for chlorine generation in the
production of PVC, so you can imagine.
China became the world's biggest producer in 2005 or so, edging out the
US 48 to 46 million tons in 2006. (This figure seems to exclude
captive production, so take it with a grain of salt.)

Socialist International. That's right, International is used as
a noun. Of less interest, this entity has an official web site,
and there's even a site in America.

SI

Spark Ignition. Ignition of the fuel-air mix in
a combustion chamber by means of an electric spark. Well, I suppose they might
use a mechanical flint-and-steel arrangement, but that could get old pretty
fast. SI is what happens in an ordinary gasoline engine that is operating
properly. In principle there can be, and over time there have been, many kinds
of internal combustion engine where combustion is initiated by a spark. In
practice, most internal combustion engines (ICE's) use spark ignition, and most
SI engines use some version of the Otto cycle. Following this in popularity
among SI engines are two-stroke engines. The other large class of ICE's use
compression ignition (CI), which for practical
purposes means Diesel engines.

SI

Sports Illustrated. An annual magazine devoted to swimsuits. The rest of
the year, they offer sports news to protect their right to the shelf space.

For the Y2K edition, twenty models posed for a total
of about 130,000 shots (in Las Alamandas, Mexico) of which about 100 were
eventually used (not sure all 20 models appeared in the issue either). I
dunno, man, that sounds suspiciously like the case of all those nude scenes
that are filmed for the benefit of the cutting-room floor. Appearing
in the SI swimsuit issue is such a boost for the models' careers that they
accept union scale -- $300/day in 1999 -- instead of the thousands per shoot
they usually command.

Scaffold Industry Association. When Texas
started executing capital criminals by lethal injection, they had difficulty
finding physicians
to participate in the execution, due in part to the opposition of the
AMA. Where does the SIA stand on this issue?
[Answer: away from the trap door.]

Sequential Interference Cancellation. SIC and
PIC (parallel) are favored by industry
because they are compatible with the current transmission coding. Adaptive
linear filters are favored in academic research but require (to keep
computational complexity low) short PN sequences
not so compatible.

SiC

Silicon Carbide. Valued as an abrasive, in
which application it is also known as Crystolon (it has hardness 9.5 on the Mohs hardness
scale). At the microscopic level, the bulk material looks like diamond
with silicon atoms substituted for half the carbons. Recall that
diamond is not a Bravais lattice, but instead is a face-centered cubic
lattice (FCC) with a basis of two carbon atoms.
SiC is the crystal one obtains by replacing one of those carbons by a
silicon. There's another name for this: Zincblende structure.

As an electronic material, SiC is interesting as a compound semiconductor
grown by epitaxial techniques. There are upwards of 180 different microscopic
structures assumed by epi-SiC, but three are of greatest interest for
electronic applications -- 3C, 4H, and 6H. In this notation, C stands for
cubic symmetry and H for hexagonal, and the number represents the inverse
stacking period. I.e., 3C is a cubic structure in which the atomic
pattern repeats with a period of three layers, etc. 3C-SiC has a band gap of
2.3 eV, 4H and 6H are larger (I think I recall). 3C-SiC has a relative
dielectric constant of 9.7, 4H and 6H have 10. All have a thermal conductivity
of about 4 W/K-cm (cf. about 1.3 for GaN, 0.3? for GaAs). All have
high dielectric breakdown fields; 3C is lowest with 1.8 × 106
V/m.

SiC

Silicon Carbon. A general alloy of silicon and carbon, typically with very little carbon.
Distinguished from silicon carbide, SiC,
supra. A special case of SiGeC.

The Latin word for ``thus,'' used by writers to
indicate that a solecism occurring in quoted material was in the original. The
word evolved into si (`yes') in a number of Romance languages. For
example, in Spanish (Castillian, to be precise),
`yes' is sí, and the word thus is así.

It's interesting to note that the word expanding the second ess of
the head term here, suelo, means `soil' outdoors and `floor' indoors
(so it sort of designates whatever is the surface underfoot). The words for
sky and ceiling work somewhat similarly: sky is cielo and
ceiling is cielo raso (literally `flat sky'). (This is also
commonly written cielorraso, which has the pronunciation: initial
r is the same phoneme as intervocalic rr.)
The word cielo is sometimes used alone for ceiling. The words
suelo and cielo differ by only a single sound in Latin America
and parts of Andalucia (i.e., the consonants in su and ci are the same).

A close synonym of suelo is piso.
Both words are common, and though they have different shades of meaning, I
doubt that the distinctions are consistent across the Spanish-speaking world.
In the Argentine dialect, or maybe just in my idiolect, suelo is more
likely than piso to be used in the figurative sense of an abstract lower
bound (like a price floor), and piso is more likely than suelo to
refer to the surface of the floor (the `flooring').

There are various other partly synonymous words. Techo is a
surface overhead, so a cielorraso (sometimes pronounced and spelled
cieloraso) is one kind of techo, and azotea (`roof') is
another. [In my dialect, however, the word azotea is rare and
techo is implicitly `roof.' Also in my dialect, tierra
(`ground') is the common word for the material soil. Tierra is the
universal Spanish term for electronic ground.
To land (an airplane) is aterrizar (un avión).]

SID

Security IDentifier.

SID

Signaling IDentifier.

SID

Society for Information Display.

SID

Sports Information Director. The media liaison of a college or university
athletic program. The SID probably doesn't do a lot of what you'd think of as
``directing,'' but at any school with a great football traditionTM, the SID outranks a mere full professor, so
some more exalted title is necessary.

SID

Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance.

SIDA

AIDS in Italian
(sindrome da inmunodeficienza acquisita).
Same in Spanish (Síndrome de
Inmunodeficiencia Adquirida) and
French (syndrome
immunodéficitaire acquis).

SIDE

Secretaría de Inteligencia del Estado (argentino).
`Secretariat for (Argentine) state intelligence.' Note that secretaria,
without the [graphical] accent (and hence with stress on the first a), means
`[female] secretary.'

sidework

Waitresses (used in the generic sense in this entry, to include waiters)
work in shifts, often short or split ones to accommodate the variable traffic.
There are usually times, particularly in a full shift, when there are no or few
customers. During this down time, the waitresses may be required to do what's
called ``sidework.''

Typical sidework includes refilling salt and pepper shakers, topping off
bottles of ketchup and hot sauce, folding silverware into narrow florets of
napkin, inserting lists of specials into menus (or attaching them in some way),
changing place settings for different meals (coffee cups and saucers for
breakfast, etc.), and assembling pizza boxes and the like. It may even include
-- gasp -- actual food preparation, like chopping vegetables. Until the
1990's, mating ketchup bottles was still a common sort of sidework, but plastic
ketchup bottles have now taken over.

Busboys' sidework tends to be more about clean-up, but there's some overlap and
practices vary. (Yes, busboy is used in the generic sense that includes
busgirls.) In some places, particularly
buffet-style restaurants and smaller family-run
restaurants, the jobs of waitress and busboy are combined. During reliably
slow periods, a restaurant may temporarily do without busboys and waitresses.
I have the impression that increasingly, large restaurant chains are using
fewer busboys. The Charlie Brown's
chain of steakhouses, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, used busboys
for until 2007, but when I was there twice in July 2008, they were nowhere in
evidence.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Leading cause of death among US
infants.

SIDT

Store Interrupt Descriptor Table.

SIE

Società Italiana di Endodonzia.
`Italian Society of Endodontics.'

SIE

Start Interpretive Execution. Martha Graham meets Saddam Hussein? Nah,
just an IBM term for the instruction that causes the
CPU to enter interpretive-execution mode and begin
running the guest program.

SIEC

Stress-Induced Excess Current. In SiO2
films, say.

siemens

Inverse ohm. Like all name units in the SI, this
should not be capitalized when spelled out. Replaces ``mho.''

Siemens

A German electronics conglomerate.

SIF

(Mechanical) Stress Intensity Factor.

SIF

Source Input Format. Term used for video -- common formats are MPEG, NTSC, PAL, SECAM.

Special Interest Group. Productive prefix in acronyms, and especially
popular with the ACM, as for example in
SIGART and
SIGCOMM. It's not just an ACM thing, though; I
notice, for example, that ACTFL also uses this
acronym, and encourages its members to join its
SIG's.

sigact, SIGACT

SIGnificant ACTion. US military jargon for anything that significantly
affects friendly or enemy forces.

ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) on DOCumentation. Also the name of a conference,
now held jointly with IPCC.

SiGe

Silicon-Germanium. An alloy of
silicon and germanium that may be more precisely described as
Si1-xGex (just try saying that thirty times in the
course of a seminar), where the atomic Ge concentration x is in the range of
about 0.1 to 0.35. SiGe is grown epitaxially in alternation with silicon
to produce pseudomorphic heterostructures. Si/SiGe is the most common group-IV
system for heterostructures. The growth has to be done at low enough
temperature that the germanium doesn't segregate, but high enough that the
atoms can diffuse to produce surfaces without structural defects. The usual
compromise is around 550-600 °C. With surfactant impurities (such as Sb)
to suppress Ge segregation, this can be raised to 650 °C (this is
necessary to achieve the higher Ge concentrations).

SiGeC

Properly, Si1-x-yGexCy. A ternary
variation of SiGe. Carbon concentration is
typically in the range 1% to 4% (i.e., y ranbging from 0.01 to 0.04).
Now grown by UHV-CVD for
device applications. It stands to reason. Research prefers simple systems
that are easier to model, hence SiGe. Commerce prefers messy systems that
work well, hence SiGe tweaked.

ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) on Management Information Systems (MIS).

signature analysis

A technique of off-line BIST. In on-line BIST,
the test circuits do not generate test patterns of bits; instead they monitor
outputs to confirm that they agree with the inputs that tested gates happen
to receive. This somewhat constrains the range of input patterns that may
be tested. In off-line testing, one takes a spell to test gates under a controlled set of inputs. If the test
equipment is not to reproduce the tested circuit (rather impractical for non-NASA BIST), then it must store input and output patterns
in ROM. This becomes prohibitive for the best
tests. One way around it is to test circuits that have cyclic or periodic
symmetry with patterns of the same symmetry, so one only needs to store one
period of a repeated pattern. Another thing to do is to examine a
précis of the output. For example, one might count ones in the output.
Signature analysis defines a signature composed of such restricted tests, and
compares this with a stored signature. The approach was pioneered at HP.

Sistema Integrado de Jubilaciones y Pensiones.
Spanish, `integrated system of retirements and
pensions.' In September 2002, the Argentine SIJP had 11.4 million members: 2.2
million receiving benefits, 9.0 million contributing, and 0.2 million undecided
or pending (i.e., with
unexercised options to retire). Cf.AFJP.

SIJS

Southern
Indiana Japanese School. ``The Southern Indiana Japanese School (SIJS)
opened in September 1997 in Evansville, Indiana, at the request of Japanese
companies locating in southwestern Indiana. SIJS exists to enable the
school-age children of Japanese employees of these companies to keep up with
their peers in Japan and to help these children integrate smoothly into
Japanese school life when they return to Japan. Any local child who would like
to study at SIJS may also be accepted if he/she has adequate Japanese language
skills for participation in classroom activities.''

Technically, the full name is Sociadad Iberolatino Americana de
Neurorradiología Diagnóstica y Terapéutica (or
Sociadade Ibero-Latino-Americana de Neurorradiologia Diagnostica y
Terapêutica). That would be `diagnostic and therapeutic neuroradiology.'

SILAN used to publish RILAN
(Revista ...) and IJNR (International
Journal of NeuroRadiology).

silane

Like methane, but with silicon in place of
carbon. Reacts explosively on contact with oxygen
in the air, so you really needn't worry about its toxicity. Popular silicon
source for CVD.

``Toughened Silcomp™
consists of silicon carbide fibers in a matrix of silicon carbide and
silicon, and is made by a melt infiltration process using processing times
on the order of minutes. This process can be used to produce fully
dense, complex shaped parts with controlled fiber architecture. The fully
dense matrix gives Toughened Silcomp™ composites good oxidation
resistance, high thermal conductivity, low thermal
expansion, and good interlaminar strength.''

silence

An argument from silence (Latin: argumentum
ex silentio) is an argument on the basis of absence of evidence. More
specifically, an argument which assumes that a phenomenon, event or fact would
have produced a surviving record or other evidence, and that therefore the
absence of such record implies the absence of what would have made it. The
canonical objection to argumenti ex silentio is the chiastic statement ``absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence.'' Prosaically, the objection is simply that evidence
might not survive or might simply have failed (yet) to be have been found.

The traditional argument that Greek alphabetic
writing began in the mid-eighth century BCE is based
on just such an argument: the earliest datable examples of Greek writing
(graffiti on some pottery) is from that era. (There is alternative argument,
based on similarity of character forms, that Greek alphabetic writing was
borrowed from Phoenician script of the eleventh century.)

silent agreement

In boxing, this is when boxers clinch, a way of taking
break within the round to rest and recover. Silent agreements tend to be made
when the fighters are well-matched. Break it up!

I'm familiar with this term from a lifetime in the ring, just like the late Dr.
Joyce Brothers. Okay, maybe I had a reminder when I read an article mentioned
at this worth-following-the-link entry.
The person quoted using the term there is Teddy Atlas, and according to Rudy
Reyes' Hero Living: Seven Strides to Awaken Your Infinite Power (2009),
it was Atlas who originally coined the term.

silent guitar

You've come the entry for silent guitars, and this is certainly the natural
place to look for information about silent guitars. However, this is just the
``entry.'' The natural place for me to put information about silent guitars,
and therefore the natural place for you to find information about silent
guitars in this glossary, is the backboard
entry.

silent movie

A misnomer. In Atoms in the
Family, Laura Fermi describes a game that she and her friends (including
Enrico) used to play in the 1920's, which they called ``silent movie.'' (I
suppose they actually called it ``film silenzioso'' or something, but
I read the book in English, and it looks like she wrote it in English too.)
The friends would get together at someone's house and perform the movie as a
play, while one person read out the captions and another person made a constant
buzzing sound in imitation of the movie projector. It reminds me of the
endless-loop recording mentioned at the WWVH entry.

In the US, it was a widespread practice to have musical accompaniment for
silent movies. Each movie house would have a regular band or orchestra. The
players became very adept at playing snippets appropriate to the scene -- and
of course, the same movies were played repeatedly. It must have been a very
special kind of medley, with opportunities for an
unusual kind of jam. Anyway, when the talkies came, all those guys were out of
a job -- just in time to join the rest of the country in being depressed.

In Italy a bad Anglophone accent (i.e., an ordinary Anglophone
pronunciation of Italian) is referred to as ``Stanlio e Ollio.'' That's
for Stanley (Laurel) and Oliver (Hardy), and the expression is still used
today. Laurel and Hardy made the transition to sound, so they made some of the
earliest talkies. With the original technology, the soundtrack had to be
recorded simultaneously with the picture -- the sound couldn't be dubbed in
later. So for the foreign market, the actors redid the scenes and they or
voice actors did the dialogue in the new target language. Evidently, this
worked best with movies that weren't meant to be taken too seriously in the
first place. Laurel and Hardy didn't know Italian, so when they spoke their
lines ``phonetically'' they were wonderfully inaccurate and funny. They did
many versions of their first full length talkie (``Pardon Us,'' about a prison
break), distributed under various titles and refilmed with some (not all)
different actors who occasionally knew the language, but they seem to have been
most successful in Italian.

silicide

Metal silicides are compounds in which
silicon typically bonds as an anion (nonmetal).
Silicides generally have high conductivity and form Schottky diodes or ohmic
contacts depending on the silicon doping level.

Most common element in the earth's crust, which is convenient for
microelectronics, which it serves as the semiconductor of choice (say 95% of
production worldwide). Learn more at its
entry in WebElements and its entry
at Chemicool.

Facts that absolutely everyone should know in their sleep: silicon has an
indirect band gap of 1.11 eV, density-of-states masses of 1.1 times the
free-electron mass for the conduction band, and 0.56 for the valence band.

James McNeill Whistler is best remembered for a portrait of his mother Anna
(the painting is called ``Arrangement in Grey and Black''). He was born of
that woman in July, 10, 1834. Not that that date is particularly important,
but I just wanted to state it that way. In June 1854, he was a cadet at West
Point.

Second Lt. Caleb Huse commenced Whistler's chemistry examination by asking the
cadet to discuss silicon. ``I am required to discuss the subject of silicon,''
Whistler responded. ``Silicon is a gas.'' ``That will do, Mr. Whistler,''
interrupted Huse. In thirteen words Whistler failed chemistry and flunked out
at West Point. Much later Whistler insisted, ``Had silicon been a gas, I would
have been a major general.''

(This is excerpted from Emory M. Thomas's 1995 biography of another General
-- Robert E. Lee.)

silicon dioxide

SiO2. A
miracle of nature. With a resistivity of 1014 to 1017
ohm-cm and a bandgap of 8.1 eV. Given that silicon and oxygen are the two most
common elements on the earth's crust, it is not surprising that silicon
dioxide--quartz in its igneous form--is very common. With such a large band
gap, the insulator should be transparent, but various
impurities
can color it by creating mid-gap states. (Intermediate states in the
bandgap between conduction band and valence band.) It is a common
material in
geodes. It's so common that the Smithsonian exhibit has at least
four other pictures, including
another geode,
gem-quality amethyst,
a cut gem of quartz, and
in combination with black cassitorite crystals.

silicone

The name given to a molecule including an Si double-bonded to
an O that dangles off the main chain formed by the two remaining
bonds of the Si. The name is formed in analogy with ketone, in
which a C plays the rôle of Si. (For similar approach to naming,
see silane. This approach is very handy
because Si and C both bond through sp³ hybrid orbitals.)
This is the original, but no longer standard meaning. It was
misapplied to certain polymers that were initially misidentified,
namely:

Polysiloxane. Any polymer constructed on a backbone of
--(-Si--O-)n-- (typically with
organic sidegroups). [There's an informative silicone
entry in the
Macrogalleria. This glossary describes an application to
razor blades.]

As if things weren't already complicated enough: in
Spanish, silicon is
silicio and silicone is silicón.

silicon germanium

It's pretty tough to make heterostructures with silicon as one of the
materials. SiGe, strained as it is (4%), was it
for a long time, unless you counted Si substrates for GaAs structures. Now
there's also SiGeC.

There's an article by Bernard S. Meyerson in the March 1994 Scientific
American on High-Speed Silicon-Germanium Electronics. The touted
technology was silicon-germanium heterojunction bipolar transistors.

silicon nitride

Si3N4.
Most useful property for semiconductor fabrication is fact that it does not
oxidize well. (Oxidation negligible in oxygen; slow in steam.) It is
therefore used as an oxidation mask, making possible various recessed oxide
isolation (ROI) strategies.

Latin name (genitive singular sillybi)
for a kind of thistle. (The name is adopted from the Greek
síllubon.) Not a bad pun on syllabus, and as it happens
there's a precedent: the word occurs in some manuscripts of Cicero's
Epistulae ad Atticum, where it is evidently (especially given alternate
manuscript traditions) a scribal error for sittybus. Sittybus,
felicitously, is a strip of parchment attached to a roll or book, bearing the
title and author's name. If sittybi were ever common, they must evidently have
become detached often; there was not so much care taken about assigning a
definite formal title to a book, with the result that for many books, the
precise title is unknown. (See the BG entry for
more discussion of titles.)

silo

A building for storing grain. Usually in the form of right circular
cylinder oriented vertically, with a hemispherical cap. Grain elevators
are used to convey grain to the top, and grain-elevator explosions (a
spark from the elevator setting off an explosion of grain dust) are one of
the charming dangers of the farming life.

This archived
usenet posting mentions safety standards, but these are all based on
raw experience. The underlying physics of dispersed particle movement is
only now beginning to be studied in a way that is at all scientific.

Silo

A chain of appliance stores. You know, a big chain like this can
request special models to be made for them by a manufacturer. Such models
may be better in some respect, but they typically have different model
numbers than the standard appliances that they are versions of, so
comparison shopping is harder. Also, if a competitor promises to match
any offer (usually ``advertised offer''), the fact that they don't sell
(or even get) the special model makes the offer to match moot.

Argentum, abbreviated Ag, q.v..
In German, the nounsilver is Silber.
The phrase ``quite as'' can be translated ``eben so,'' where eben
is cognate with English even. Also, the English preposition over
has a meaning similar to its German cognate über. The phrase ``I
have seven'' (pieces of silver, say) is rendered ``ich habe sieben''
(Stücke Silber). Notice a pattern? No? Go study the Hacksilber entry.

As long as we've mentioned sieben, we might as well mention that at
different times during the latter half of the eighteenth century and into the
beginning of the nineteenth, the Habsburg Empire issued a 7-Kreuzer coin
that was informally known as the Siebener. The name of another, more
popular coin was used in the sense of silver (yeah -- that's what the entry's
about!) even though its name has nothing etymologically to do with silver:
Groschen.

Silver

The Lone Ranger's horse.

Silver Age

The silver age of Rome is a designation of a period running roughly from
the middle of the first century of this era (CE)
to the end of the second century. It followed the Golden Age, which covers a period that began
with the first century BCE.

silver spoon

A child born into a rich family may be described as being born with a
silver spoon in his mouth. In Spanish one says
that he ``nació en una cuna de oro'' -- `was born in a golden
crib.' In that case, I don't think that a C-section is merely optional any
more.

SIMplified BIDirectional Signaling. The expansion and explanation of this
British railroad acronym was provided by Clive D.W. Feather on the uk.transport.london newsgroup (and picked
up by the SBF monitoring station in Ontario).

Every 5 or 10 miles on double track
there's a pair of crossovers. The signal before the crossovers has a
right-hand feather indicating a move to the
right-hand ("wrong") line. There are then no signals until the next
crossover, where there's a signal guarding the crossover.

SIMBIDS signal: shows plain green to
continue on the "wrong" line, or yellow or green plus a
left-hand feather for moves back to the correct line.

Because they are only operated by the track circuits, when a train is running
on the wrong line the automatic signals facing the other way stay green, then
change to yellow and red as the train approaches, then turn back to green.

[*] On four-aspect lines there are two repeaters; the first
shows green or double yellow; the second shows green or single or double
yellow.

SIMD

Single-Instruction, Multiple Data. It's pronounced ``sim dee.'' SIMD is
part of a strategy and an aspect of architecture for parallel-processor
computing; cf.MIMD.

Something like the SIMD idea is implemented in serial machines by
superscalar instructions, called MMX
technology in Pentium processors (also used in
AMD K6-2 processors, etc.).

SIMM

Single Inline Memory Module. (I think this was originally a Wang Labs tm.)

The count nounsimple is an obsolete
term for drug component, from the time when most such simples were leaves,
roots, stems, buds and other parts of plants, and a few bits of animals. Until
the nineteenth century, most physicians (called physics, in those days)
collected their own simples. If ``simple'' is too simple, then you want the
word pharmacognosy: the study of medicines derived from natural sources
(i.e., simples). Physics (I just like that word) typically also grew
various medicinal plants in their own gardens. Now you're probably wondering
about leeches, right? For the dirty, dirty, low, low down on those, see the
Liverpuddle, uh, entry.

simpliciter

Latin expression which, as it occurs today,
can be understood to mean `without qualification' without qualification.

simplistic!

True enough to hurt.

SIMS

Secondary Ion Mass Spectroscopy. As a surface is sputter etched,
the distribution of mass in ions sputtered from the surface (``secondary
ions'') is tracked as a function of depth (strictly speaking, the mass
spectrometer measures not mass but the charge-to-mass ratio). This
generates (destructively) a picture of the various atomic concentrations
as a function of depth. Because the depth of sputter etching is not
perfectly sharp or uniform, these plots underestimate the sharpness of
changes in atomic concentration. Also expanded as
Stable Isotope Mass Spectromet{er|ry}. That's not quite right, because
any reasonably-long-lived isotope can be investigated.

Social Insurance Number. Canadian
equivalent of the Social Security Number (SSN) in
the US. In French, Numéro d'Assurance
Sociale (NAS). Unlike the SSN, it contains a
1-digit Luhn checksum.

sin

Spanish: `without.' You have to be careful
how you use this. Today I ordered ice cream for
dessert. Sayra asked if I wanted it ``¿con crema?'' (`with
cream?') and I answered ``Sin.'' When she got back I realized she
thought I'd said ``Sí.''

Such confusions are less likely in Portuguese (sem and sim for
`without' and `yes,' respectively), to say nothing of Italian (senza and
si) or French (sans and
oui). The words for without here all come from the
Latinsine. The regular sound shifts would
and in fact did yield sen in Spanish. The form with e was still common
in medieval Castilian, and continues as the standard form in Catalan today.
The form with i superseded it in modern Spanish, however. According to
Corominas y Pascual, this change is
unexplained. For Germanic words with the meaning of without, see
ohne.

SINAD

SIgnal, Noise, And Distortion. Pronounced ``sine-add.'' A kind of
signal-to-noise ratio: the ratio of signal to the sum of noise plus signal
harmonics (distortion).

In certain situations, even though distortion is significant, plain old
signal-to-noise (SNR) is a more appropriate
figure of merit.

sine die

Latin meaning `without a day'; that is, without
a date set for the next meeting.

Spanish, literally meaning `without
seizure,' and always meaning `nevertheless' or `however.' (The latter
translation refers only to the use of however as a sentence adverbial,
of course, and not in the sense `howsoever.') There is no word pause in the
Spanish phrase -- it sounds like one word. (Cf.nimporta.)

A chunk of matter in the crystalline state without any but point defects.
Contrasted from polycrystalline.

Singleton, Ann

Pen name that Ruth Benedict used as a poet. Ruth Benedict is best known as
the author of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and of Patterns of
Culture.

singular team names

I mean team names like the Stanford Cardinal or the North Dakota State
Bison. This isn't an entry; it's just a data dump.

sinistrograde

Leftward. A term to describe writing as right-to-left and letters as
facing left (i.e., oriented in the usual direction for right-to-left
writing). Our main entry for this stuff is at what I suppose is conventionally
counted as the antonym: dextrograde.

SINK

Single Income, No Kids. A demographic with less discretionary income than
DINK.

When this product was new, the ``metal'' gates in many MOS transistors were
still often made of elemental or alloy metal (i.e. really of metal).
The SIPMOS name indicates the use of gates made out of highly doped
semiconductor instead (degenerately-doped silicon, to be precise). This silicon is polycrystalline because it is deposited
over an oxide layer. MOS gates function essentially
as capacitor plates, so low resistivity is not very important for low-frequency
operation. The conduction channel between source and drain, on the other hand,
must have excellent electron mobility and very low trap density, and for all
practical purposes is made of single-crystal silicon. (Indeed, even though the
MOS concept is simpler, and the first patent for an IGFET was issued as early as 1935, bipolar
transistors were commercialized for more than a decade before MOS technology
became viable. MOS simply had to wait for a cleaner manufacturing process.
That cleaner process was developed by continual improvements in the manufacture
of bipolar technology. Now the roles are reversed, and bipolar manufacture
piggy-backs on developments made primarily to improve MOS fabrication.)

Because the drain and source carry substantial current (compared to the gate),
high conductivity is desirable there also. In any case, the geometry of the
fabrication process makes the source and drain out of the same single-crystal
material as the channel. So polycrystalline silicon (polysilicon,
Polysilizium in German, or just poly for
short) implies polysilicon gate.

Moreover, bothering to mention the polysilicon in the name implies something
else as well: since polysilicon gates quickly became standard, it implies that
the acronym was created early on in the development of polysilicon MOS, or it
would have been nothing distinctive enough to mention in the name. That is the
case here: SIPMOS is a form of enhancement-mode DMOS. DMOS uses diffusion rather than implantation to
dope the channel. This tends to make coarser features, and for integrated
electronics, diffusion was generally replaced by implantation and by
self-alignment process (see SAG). SIPMOS was for
discrete devices, and at this point the P might as well stand for power, since
the main attractive features of SIPMOS are voltage ratings to 1kV and current
ratings to 30A. (I don't know a maximum power rating, but it must be less than
30kW.)

Screening Information Request. Government acquisitions term. There may be
multiple SIR's. In response to a SIR, companies that want to bid on a contract
provide information that allows the agency issuing the SIR to ``down-select''
companies. (Being down-selected is the complement of being winnowed out.
Those down-selected are qualified to bid or respond to a further SIR.)

Standard Improvement Request. That is, a request for a change in an
existing standard.

SIR

Student Instructional Ratings. A questionnaire devised by the
Educational Testing Service (ETS).

SIR

Surface Imaging Resist.

SIR

Sustained Information Rate. Generally not as good and not as much used
as Peak information rate.

SIRT

Staten Island Rapid Transit. Part of MTA.
Although part of the City of New York, Staten Island is connected to the
rest of the city only by road and ferry, not by subway; the SIRT line ends
at the ferry docks.

SIRTF

Space InfraRed Telescope Facility. Was Shuttle
Infra....

SIS

Sequential Interactive System.

sis

Informal for SISter. In the vocative, ``sister'' sounds very
formal and remote, as ``mother'' does. In Spanish, even mi madre (`my
mother') sounds awkward in speech, and mi mami or mi mamá
is normal and unchildish. Be sure to pronounce the accent (i.e., stress
the second syllable) in mamá. The word with the stress on the
first syllable (spelled mama) means `breast.'

SIS

``SISters.'' A soap opera.

(For those of you unfamiliar with the pronunciation of the word sister,
it goes just like the beginning of the word cistercian, up to but not including the
third sibilant, except that the stress goes on the first syllable. HTH!)

Serials Industry Systems Advisory Committee. A committee of the Book
Industry Study Group (BISG) that developed and
promoted voluntary standardized formats for the electronic transmission of
serials information, subject to National Information Standards Organization
(NISO) approval. Now dissolved into BASIC.

SISDEP

Simulation of Semiconductor Devices and Processes. An interrnational
conference. Sponsored by IEEE. This has been
continued by SISPAD.

International Conference on Simulation of
Semiconductor Processes and Devices. A forum for
TCAD. SISPAD96, in Tokyo, brought together the
International Workshop on Numerical Modeling of Processes and Devices (NUPAD),
the International Workshop on VLSI Process and Device Modeling (VPAD), and the
International Conference on Simulation of Semiconductor Devices and Processes
(SISDEP), which had been held in the U.S., Japan, and Europe, respectively.
Sponsored by IEEE. SISPAD97 was in Boston.

Before the mid-1960's, a large fraction of US colleges and universities,
including most of the prestigious undergraduate colleges in the Northeast, were
all-male. Students at these schools would date girls (or ``girls,'' if you
prefer) who attended women's colleges that were strategically close. These
were called sister schools. SMC was sister
school to Notre Dame, about as Douglas College was to
Rutgers, Mary Washington College (now UMW) to
the University of Virginia, etc.

By the end of the 1970's, most of the previously all-male schools had gone
coed, as had most of the sister schools. Perhaps the latter should now be
called ex-sister-schools or something, but that's a bit cumbersome and there's
an alternate solution. Evidently in the interests of egalitarian language, the
term ``brother school'' has come into use. This is a useful term and clear
enough, even if the relationships of brother and sister schools are not
entirely symmetric, and it sanctions the continued use of the otherwise
anachronistic term ``sister school.''

If you're really eager to go to a particular school, whether you're male or
female (and especially if you're male or female), you might want to apply to
the sister school as a safety. Nowadays students at the sister school
typically have a partnership that allows students at the sister school to take
classes at the brother school. If you're a lesbian or a straight male, you'll
probably also appreciate how the student body stacks up. (Of course, the
majority of US college campuses today are decidedly majority-female anyway.)

SIT

Static Induction Transistor. A kind of gridded-base transistor. [The
permeable-base transistor (PBT) is another.] The
motivation is to minimize the disadvantages of low majority-carrier
mobility in the base. These problems are most significant in compound
semiconductors, where hole mobility is typically an order of magnitude
lower than electron mobility (in silicon it's more like a factor of three).

There's generally a big push on in the late nineties to finally come up with
a solid-state replacement for the vacuum devices, such as traveling-wave
tubes (TWT's) and klystrons, that are used in
high-power applications (1kW and up, for cellular and satellite base stations
and such). Wide band-gap compound semiconductors are a great hope in this
hot area. As of fall 1998, Northrup-Grumman was selling a power amplifier
based on SiC SIT's.

SITC

Standard International Trade Classification.

sitcom, sit-com

SITuation COMedy. A television show with regular cast of characters
and a common situation (location). The characters regularly get into
situations hilarious enough to make a tape recorder laugh like a roomful
of idiots.

SITI

Saratoga International Theatre Institute.

sitting

In a 1927 TNR article mentioned at the
crease entry, Bruce Bliven wrote about Sacco and
Vanzetti:

You must not be deceived by an accent, or by the workingman's easy way they
have of sitting on a hard bench as though they were used to it. These are book
men. Their political faith is philosophic anarchism, and they know its
literature from Kropotkin down.

In chapter 4 of The Great Gatsby (1925), Nick comments on Mr. Gatsby:

He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness
of movement that is so peculiarly American--that comes, I suppose, with the
absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the
formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually
breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was
never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient
opening and closing of a hand.

Sitzkrieg

The `sitting war.' Compound noun modeled on the German word
Blitzkrieg, `lightning war.' (Blitz is `lightning'; sitz
is the root and a common combining form of sitzen, `to sit.')
Sitzkrieg is another name for ``the Phony War'' -- the period following the
German and Russian conquest of Poland, when England and France were officially
at war with Germany but there was no shooting going on between the parties at
war.

A new Greek-letter society -- a fraternity. It seems all the three-letter
names were taken, so they doubled up. Do I really, really have to
explain this? The idea is that sigma represents a standard deviation, and any
process that produces a good or service is subject to fluctuations
(characterized by sigma) about a mean or average. Typically, probability
distributions extend out a number of sigma from the mean, so even if the
average is acceptable, not all of the production will be. A common shape of
theoretical probability distributions is the ``normal'' or Gaussian
distribution. If your process is such that the mean is six sigma or more
better than (i.e., away from) the threshold for acceptable results, and
if the distribution is Gaussian (which it isn't, exactly) (it probably isn't
even approximately Gaussian), then unacceptable results are about
one-in-a-billion. If improving yield from fair (90%) to astronomically good
(99.9999999%) requires increasing costs by more than about 10%, then you're
probably better off with fair yield. Six Sigma is the infantile idea of
management that screams ``No! Perfection improves profitability, no matter
what the cost!'' We also mention Six Sigma at the Lean Sigma entry.

Oh no. The hallowed stacks of our holy library have been desecrated: Juran
Institute's Six Sigma Breakthrough and Beyond: Quality Performance Breakthrough
Methods. With a foreword by Joseph M. Juran! A book administered into existence (possibly even
written, I don't know) by Joseph A. De Feo and William W. Barnard. De
Feo means `of ugly' in Modern Spanish, but
Feo probably originally meant something like `faith' in this context.

Hey wait a second -- Six Sigma has spawned a bunch of initialisms! So it's
good for something.

Oh, here's something hot off the press -- on October 12, 2000, not even a full
century after Oscar Wilde's deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism (he died
Nov. 30, 1900)! A Jesuit quarterly, La Civilita Cattolica, has
rehabilitated Mr. Wilde. As evidence of Wilde's interest in the Catholic
church, Spadaro wrote that Wilde wanted to go to a Jesuit retreat upon his
release from prison in 1897. The Jesuits asked him to wait a year as a test
that his desire was real.

Someone who was more careful about his posthumous religious condition was
An interesting comparison may be drawn with George Santayana. The
Spanish-born Santayana was an American philosopher,
part of the intellectual and cultural social circles that included
E. M. Forster, Robert Lowell, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell,
Lytton Strachey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (I feel so dirty introducing someone
who needed no introduction, but Santayana's stock took a swift dive after his
death in 1952, aet. 90. Today he is remembered, if at all, for a few aphorisms
in his voluminous writings.) Santayana was an atheist, but he was a decidedly
Roman Catholic atheist. He identified both with Catholicism, and
against Protestantism, but he didn't accept Catholicism. It seems to be
a recurring theme: he was regarded as an American, published in English,
worked and spent most of his life in America, but he harbored fundamental
reservations against America. Then again, nowadays that's not so unusual for
an academic. He remained a Spanish subject until his death. It's hard to
summarize or perhaps to make sense of his religious views, but it's fair to say
that he regarded Roman Catholicism as a more legitimate or appropriate form of
error than other religions. Do not tell me this is unreasonable; he was a
philosopher, so he could believe anything. I only mention all this to say that
he spent the last decade of his long life at a home run by the Blue Nuns in
Rome. (I'm only going to explain once: Blue Nun is a white wine; blue nuns are
unhappy nuns of ordinary coloration; the Blue Nuns are an Irish order that
wears blue habits.) Recognizing the nuns' earnest desire for his salvation, he
left explicit instructions to his executors that even if, in his dying moments,
he should happen to nod in apparent acceptance and be given last rites, it
should be understood that he nodded just to get the nuns and priests to stop
pestering him, and that his apparent acquiescence should under no circumstances
be misconstrued as a deathbed conversion. Aaah, give it a rest. For an
alternative attitude, see assassination, political.

A note about the use of S.J. following a name: it may mean that the man is
a Roman Catholic priest in the Jesuit Order, but it may also mean that he is
a ``brother'' (i.e., not a priest). (A similar practice applies to O.P.)

Traditionally (i.e., until some time after the middle of the twentieth
century), Jesuits wore black robes. One of my father's Catholic school
teachers, whenever discovered by his students at the race track, would
habitually joke that underneath his pants, he was wearing his black robe. In
some places and times, ``black robe'' could be a synecdoche for Jesuit.
For an example, see the black monks entry.

Generally speaking, if you get an audience with the pope and you don't have a
standard religious habit, it's good to wear black. It's just generally
respectful and gets things off to a smooth start, so long as the pope is not
comatose. And if you're female, don't wear anything too daring, if you know
what I mean.

Saint Joseph's College. In
Pennsylvania. Informally called ``Saint Joe's.'' Rob went there for a couple
of years, majoring in accounting. When he couldn't take the tedium any more,
he transferred to business at BC.

Saint Joseph County (Indiana) Spay Neuter
Assistance Program. Sometimes it's possible for an acronym to be a bit too
graphic, even if not accurately so. SJC-SNAP ``is a program designed to help
low income pet owners spay and neuter their pets.'' The goal is evidently to
avoid littering: to have low-income, low-outcome pets. Still, it strikes me
that to ``spay and neuter'' a pet is overdoing things. To paraphrase the woman
I know who complained about ``male e__________'' email, it would require
removing what it hasn't got.

Incidentally, the explanatory quote dissected above is from a flyer distributed
by the Pre-Vet Club [oooh, just missed a good pun opportunity by one letter]
and the Biology Club at the University of Notre Dame.
They sponsored a ``Domer Doggy Walk'' on September 28, 2008.
Events included a
``Blessing of the Dogs.'' That reminds me that before my father was kicked out
of Catholic elementary school, for taking an emergency piss in the neighborhood
of a Virgin Mary statue or idol or whatever, he was taught the Latin prayers
needed to administer ultimate unction, again in case of emergency. It gets me
to wondering whether these things can be done with the speaking parts done
remotely (see the Joyce ACC entry for some
evidence regarding that) by teleconference, or with a tape-recording or
synthesized voice or parrot or a talking dog named Fido.

A trio of contests was scheduled for 2pm: ``Friendliest dog,'' ``Best trick,''
and -- was there a prize for this? -- ``Best owner/dog look-alike.''
One of the activities (noon to 3pm) was ``Doggie Tattoos.'' Now every dog can
be, or at least have, a ``Spot.'' I suppose they could also get one of those
stylized hearts with a ribbon across the middle saying ``Bitch.''

Saint Joseph's University,
Philadelphia's Jesuit University. Never heard it called that. I've always
heard it called ``Saint Joe's.'' Rob went there. Majored in accounting,
was bored out of his mind. Bailed out to ``Business'' and transferred to BC. (For stuff about Jesuits,
see SJ.)

Postal abbreviation for the Canadian
(.ca) province of Saskatchewan (spelled that right in
one try!). Capital: Regina;
Most Frequent Mistaken Guess For The Capital: Saskatoon. Not on DST -- ahead of its (neighbours') time in the summer.

skewer the odds

To put a sharp cooking implement through alternate integers, starting
with the number one. (This entry was inspired by a sports commentator's
skewering of a standard idiom.)

skid marks

Skid marks on fat men's underpants? No. Impossible. I assure you, and I
can prove it. You see, skid marks are caused by rubber abraded from tires by
friction with the road when one makes a rapid stop. Tires don't wear
underpants (and if they did it wouldn't be underwear -- perhaps you're thinking
of grille bras). If one were to
put underpants on a tire, then during a skid the rubber wouldn't be in contact
with the road, so there wouldn't be a rubber skid mark. Also, skid marks
appear on the road, and it is self-evident that you can't put underpants on a
road -- they're not big enough.

I swear, people are willing to believe all kinds of I-won't-say-it! (Note
that here I don't mean what-I-won't-say literally.) The world needs experts
trained in logic -- philosophers -- to enable them to think. It's a wonder
ordinary people ever come to a valid conclusion, if they do. Hmmm, that
reminds me: for a sociological analysis, see the
dirty underwear entry.

SKIN

Spending my Kids' INheritance. Spelled out on tee shirts.

There's a joke at least as old as the people who wear such
tee shirts, that
madness is genetic -- you get it from your children.

skintight burqa

Every time I think I've come up with a really original, wildly improbable
concept, Google
demonstrates that I'm late to the party.

Sungkyunkwan
University. Founded in 1398. Their landing page once proclaimed ``Beyond
Korea, Global SKKU,'' and the slogan still appears on scattered webpages, but
they seem to have campuses only in Korea (Seoul and Suwan). They have a lot of
``international partners'' and student exchange programs. But despite their
having some English-language
webpages, I think the student exchange is mainly for export. The school
does seem to be an increasingly popular university for Koreans, behind Seoul
National University.

As was apparent from the early advertising campaigns, Hershey wanted to give
the bar a Scandinavian appeal, and may have chosen a word which would be likely
to be pronounced ``score'' to suggest some erotic reference to various blondes
acting in the ads. FWIW, however, the
Swedish word which means `score' is spelled
skår. The Swedish word skor means `shoes,' which might be read as
suggesting that the caramel is as tough as leather. (For another unfortunate
name associated with shoes, see the incubus
entry.)

Also, Skôr is (nominative singular) `dung' in ancient Greek. (Just to jog your memory, and to
draw the connection with useful words like scatological, see the
WGASA entry.) For other infelicitously named
ingestible products, see BM,
Colon, Dropsy,
Mental, and Sucrets. I figure
slime phone rates a mention too, since it
is brought close to the mouth.

skort, skorts

The word is a blend of skirt and shorts. The garment is a
pair of shorts with a flap or panel across the front, and possibly the back, to
make it resemble a skirt.

The women on the crew of the Enterprise in
ST:TOS. Grace Lee Whitney played hot Yeoman
Janice Rand in the first half of the first season of ST, and her skort... well,
one often speaks (spoke? sporked?) of a garment ``flattering a woman's
figure,'' but I'm not sure of the appropriate terminology for a garment that
reveals by revealing. Anyway, somewhere I remember reading or hearing her
claim that the original plan was for the crew women to wear pants or a longer
skirt, and that skorts were used at her suggestion, but this is hard to track
down.

skosh

A little bit. Bill Cosby gave this little bit of slang greater currency in
endorsement advertisements for jeans for, you know, older men. They had ``a
skosh more room'' up front, presumably to accommodate your enlarged prostate.

The word is supposed to be derived from the Japanese sukoshi, a noun and
adverb meaning `a little bit.' It's natural that the u in the standard
transliteration does not appear in the English spelling of the loan. The u
following s in Japanese, while regarded phonemically as equivalent to the u's
transcribed elsewhere, is more centered (i.e., it is articulated further
back than ordinary /u/, a front vowel) and seems more indistinct. Moreover, a
u between any two unvoiced consonants is normally indistinct, so a u following
s and preceding an unvoiced consonant often seems to disappear. Add to this
the fact that syllables in Japanese are pronounced more rapidly than in English
(even more rapidly than in French), and it would
be surprising if the u survived the language crossing. In some accents I've
heard, the i in final shi also tends to disappear.

This feature of Japanese pronunciation helps to keep loans from English to
Japanese somewhat recognizable. Japanese doesn't have a lot of consonant
clusters. Formally, it doesn't have any consonant clusters beginning in s
unless you count the geminate ss or the palatalized sha, shu, and sho (which
are represented in Japanese kana as
shi + ya, shi + yu, and shi + yo). However,
clusters like sk, st, and sp are reproduced fairly accurately with katakana
spellings equivalent to suk, sut, sup, etc.

The word sukoshi occurs in the following common phrase: Sukoshi
tsumete-kudasaimasen-ka? A good ``functional translation'' of this is
`Would you please move over a little?' The second-person pronoun could be made
explicit but is usually just understood (i.e., Japanese is a pro-drop
language). The courtesy (`please' in English) is in the verb suffix, and the
phrase is marked as a question by the particle -ka. (The syntax, which is
altered in English to distinguish a declaration from a question, is the same
here as it would be for a declarative sentence.) The interesting thing about
this request is the base verb, which does not mean `move,' exactly. The verb
tsumeru means `to pack.' The request is literally that the person or
persons addressed `pack [together] a little [more closely].' The context that
makes this phrase common is the subway. More common than the phrase is a
nonverbal indication that one wants to sit down. It is not considered rude to
make a sweeping motion of one's hand to indicate what one wishes done.

Skt.

Sanskrit. This does not mean script written in sand.

SKU

Stock-Keeping Unit. In NYC I've heard the acronym pronounced ``skew.'' A
unique ID Number that usually defines an item at the style, color, and size
level in retail applications.

Actually, that's the loose definition. The strict meaning of skwarka
has to do with the preparation of schmaltz (German and Yiddish word for
cooked fat). During cooking, some insoluble parts (incl. skin) settle out
(they form what are called grumos in
Spanish) and burn. These tasty
arteriosclerosizing (it must be a word -- I wrote it without spaces) bits are
skwarka in the strictest technical sense of the word.

SL

Postal code for Saarland, one of the sixteen states
(Länder) of the German Federal Republic (FRG). [Like most of the country information in this
glossary, Germany's is at the domain code .de.]

The state's area is 2,570 sq. km.
Its population was 1,056,000 by the census of 1987, estimated at 1,083,000 for
1997.

Seattle Language Academy. A ``non-profit
language school in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle offering both group
classes and individual lessons in foreign languages and in English as a second language. Classes and private
tutoring are available in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese,
Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.
Seattle Language Academy also offers instruction in
Latin and Ancient Greek.''

Many years ago, my father and his boss were in the back of a taxi, down
'Bama way, speakin'
Spanish, prolly.
The driver commented, ``Ah shaw woo lack t'speeknothah langage lack yoo doo.''
My father had to translate for his boss, who could speak and understand
English. The boss said [in translation] ``tell him to start with English.''

In 1988 or thereabouts, I told this story to a native Louisianan who was
working out of Washington, DC (you know -- the
city with Northern charm and Southern efficiency). He complained that I had
flubbed the accent: I was using Harlem (NY) accent instead of any Southern
accent. Shee! Demd egg-spits.

There's a very slightly relevant story, which I can't vouch for personally and
haven't been able to trace back to a good source, that got a lot of newsgroup
circulation starting in late October of 1994. It went that the bluesman K.J.
James was asked to ``play some Clapton'' and replied ``Well, son... I'm an old
black man, and you're asking me to try to sound like a young white man trying
to sound like an old black man... and that's just too much pretending for me.''
These things are relative, as they say. Clapton was 49 at the time. While his
age was still increasing at a rate of 7 days a week, I had some difficulty
determining the age of Kelly ``KJ'' James. He went right on touring college
campuses into 2011, but died on January 5, 2012, aged 76, so less than a decade
separated him from Clapton.

I nearly died on January 4, 1984. A couple of weeks later, still scarred up
but out of the hospital, I was driving back to school to finish my dissertation
when Eric Burdon and the Animals' ``For Your Love'' came on the radio. That
was when the thought first occurred to me: ``I'm glad I lived.''

SLA

Semiconductor Laser Amplifier.

SLA

Service Level Agreement. ``Level'' in the sense of ``how much,'' such as
how much up-time, how much help desk, etc.

Symbionese Liberation Army. [The people who kidnapped Patty Hearst.]
All those years ago. In July 1999, a former SLA member who had been living
a quiet life as a mother and homemaker appeared in a
California court to face old charges. Everybody knows there's no statute
of limitations on murder.

Gee, I hope ``homemaker'' is still the right word. It used to be
``housewife,'' but that was considered sexist. So now homemaker
means `housewife,' and househusband means `male homemaker.'
Last I heard, anyway. To use the wrong word would be such a crime.

Stand-off Land Attack Missile. For use by strike aircraft against
surface targets.

SLAM

Street-Legal Arts Magazine. They've got a shingle on Ironwood, just
North past the Schlotzky's at the intersection with US 23. It's Saint
Joseph County, but I'm not sure if it's technically within South Bend, IN.

SLAMRAAM

Surface-Launched Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air
Missile. Nope -- I don't get how it can be air-to-air and surface lauched,
unless it's launched from a plane on the runway. But with an acronym this
good, you've got to overlook the minor logical difficulties.

SLAP

Say the unknown word to yourself, Look for passage clues to the meaning of
the word, Ask yourself what the word might mean and find a word or phrase that
shows the meaning, and Put the definition in the passage to see if it makes
sense. A strategy by Joanne F. Carlisle, Ph.D., in ``Fostering Morphological
Processing, Vocabulary Development, and Reading Comprehension,'' chapter 5 in
Vocabulary
Acquisition (2007). This entry is placed here for illustrative and
acronym-focused purposes; it does not constitute an endorsement.

SLAPP

Strategic {Lawsuit[s]|Litigation} Against Public Participation. A civil
suit threatened or brought by a company against those engaged in protest
against it.

Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile. In principle, this could be
sea-launched, but the whole point of sea-launched ballistic missiles --
strategic ballistic missiles during the Cold War, anyway -- is concealment.
Surface ships don't serve that function very well. Cf.SLCM.

SLC

Salt Lake City. When you write ``SLC, UT,''
take care not to leave out the central letter.

Second-Line Drug. Term used in tuberculosis treatment for drugs that are
generally less effective, more toxic (or ``less well tolerated''), and more
expensive than first-line drugs. The first-line drugs are isoniazid and
rifampin. Resistance to isoniazid develops readily, so it is normally used
together with rifampin. There are six main classes of SLD's: aminoglycosides,
polypeptides, fluoroquinolones, thioamides, cycloserine, and
para-aminosalicylic acid.

Single Large Expensive Drive. Possibly pejorative acronym meant to
contrast with RAID (q.v.).

sleep like a baby

Toss and turn constantly, pausing only every fifteen minutes to wake up and
squall. Their faces do look relaxed as they drool and nod off, though.

sleep like a lamb

You know, it's not enough to keep sheep safe. You have to make them
feel safe, or their health suffers and they produce less wool.

sleep of the just

A slumber that is proverbially untroubled, because the just have clear
consciences. In reality, the sleep of the just is troubled by doubts, while
the truly unjust are not bothered by their consciences.

Sleep with Him on the First Date, It's Okay to

The title, and presumably a recommendation, of a book by Andrea Syrtash and
Jeff Wilser, published in 2013. It seems a natural corollary to the subtitle
of Syrtash's 2011 book, Cheat On Your Husband (with Your Husband): How to
Date Your Spouse.

Time dervative of output voltage in response to a sudden change in
input voltage.

SLG

Soda-Lime Glass. Very different from a glass of lime soda.

SLIC

Subscriber Line Interface { Circuit | Card }.

slice

In golf, a ball is said to slice when it curves through the air opposite
the side the golfer has driven it from (viz., toward the right for a
right-handed golfer, and conversely). A ball curving to the opposite side is
said to hook.

slide-off

A kind of motor-vehicle accident that occurs on -- and not entirely on
-- slippery roads. (In northern Indiana, that usually means icy or snowy
conditions, but a little bit of rain -- not yet enough to wash off any oil --
can also be treacherous.) The driver loses control of the vehicle and it
slides off the road into a soft shoulder or ditch or worse. In California, it
tumbles 100 feet into a ravine or canyon, or down a mountainside, and then
either plunges into the ocean or explodes, as you can tell from any movie
(except for ``It's a Mad, Mad,
Mad, Mad World,'' but that was just crazy). Outside of California, a
slide-off is better than a slide into oncoming traffic, a kind of accident for
which there isn't any special term that I am aware of. (Not even my editor
came up with anything. It can be described, of course, but ``slide-over'' and
``slide-across'' are at best rare nouns, and ``cross-over'' is a noun with
different meanings.)

Slightly to the Right

Written by H.L. ``Bill'' Richardson, in frustration after the defeat of
Barry Goldwater in the 1964 US presidential election. His stated objective was
to teach like-minded Republicans how to communicate (the threat of Communism)
more effectively. Since his regular employment was in the advertising
business, his opinions may be regarded as relevantly ``expert.''

I think the book was self-published. (The publisher is listed on the 1965
paperback as Constructive Action, Inc.; P.O. Box 4006; Whittier, California
90607.) I think you might find it quite difficult to obtain a copy today.

This is a citation entry. In other words, I don't expect many people to come
here directly because they were surfing the web for information about Bill
Richardson's book that they remembered from way back. It's here so I don't
have to repeat the reference information at the two or three places where I
quote from the book. As it happens, however, so far I only cite the book from
the cybernetic warfare entry. In the
future, the book will also be cited in the John Dewey entry. Since that entry
isn't ready and I've got the book handy now, let me just quote the Dewey
material here. The dedication of Richardson's book reads as follows:

If you think this book is going to be a literary masterpiece, then forget it.
I am a product of the progressive, permissive, regressive school of education
(degenerate Deweyism), which has permeated the American scene for the past
thirty years. My spelling is atrocious and my handwriting is a scribble, and
if it weren't for the patience and fortitude of my volunteer secretaries and my
captive wife, who for some unaccountable reason either escaped or rose above
scholastic pablum, this book wouldn't be here today.

A one-time-only discount product consignment sold in Israel, the happy
result of a little spelling error by a Hong Kong
manufacturer, 1997 or 1998, I think. Some irregulars you can't sell in an
Anglophone country.

If you can tear yourself away from the keyboard, you might have a look at a
wonderful short History of the Logarithmic Slide Rule, by F. Cajori
(bound in a reprint edition with W. W. Rouse Ball's String Figures).

Slip Stick

Song in The Numbers By Whom album. Here's what I've been able to
transcribe of the lyrics so far:

I've got my clipboard, my text books
Lead me to exam room
Yeah, I'm off to the civil war
I've got my pencil, my staple gun
I'm runnin' in the rain
Gonna run 'til my feet are raw!
Slip stick, slip stick, do multiplication
Using only rows C and D.
Slip stick, slip stick, squared calculation:
It's so easy, use A and B.
So easy -- use A and B.
It's a hard, hard knurl!
I left my pocket protector
Bungalow behind me
I left the door ajar.
I got my vacuum tube;
Full of hot tea and sugar.
Left the keys right in my car.
Slip stick, slip stick, do multiplication
Only half way -- about three.
Slip stick, slip stick, a trig. relation;
I have got to use S and T,
Have got to use S and T.

Slip Stick Hymn

I came up as the rule's three-century reign passed, in the waning days of
the glorious stick age.

Sliding Home

More emblematic than a pocket protector,
More democratic than a mechanical pencil,
More tactile than the card catalog,
More personal than unfashionable clothes,
More magical than a fire cow,
More sublime than all.
Amen.

sliver

In the textile industry, a long bundle or ribbon of combed fiber ready for
spinning is called a sliver, which is pronounced with a long i (like
shriver).

SLJ

School Library Journal.

SLM

Scribe-Line Monitor. For any level of integration below WSI, a wafer is scribed and then broken into chips
along the scribed lines. Evidently, a certain fraction of the area of the
wafer, of width sufficient to allow for uncertainty in the scribing, cannot be
used for product circuit. However, one can place test circuits in that space
(the regions where the scribe lines will be drawn) to test the wafer ---
i.e., the fab process -- before scribing. This approach provides
testing that does not cost precious real estate.

San Luis Obispo. Spanish, ``Bishop
Saint Louis.'' Geographic information at the Cal
Poly entry. Obispo is Spanish for
`bishop.' [Regarding pronunciation: there's no difference between vee and bee.
In this context (intervocalic), they both represent the voiced bilabial
fricative that is written as a Greek letter beta in the
IPA.) Avispa is `wasp.' The Italian word is
vespa, and Vespa was the name of a popular Italian motorcycle
that sounded like one. Both Spanish and Italian words come from a
Latin word mentioned at
this laser entry.

Silver Latin Poet[ry]. Applied to poets and poetry of the Silver Age
of Latin literature. Lucan and Statius are the
typical examples. Ovid is sort of borderline -- the last of the poets of the
Golden Age or GLP's, or the first of the SLP's.

SLP

Speech and Language Pathologist. Also Speech-Language Pathologist.

SLP

Super Long Play. Recording at slowest VHS speed. Also called
EP (extended).

SLR

Sta. Lucia Realty. A Philippine basketball
team. In-your-face sponsorship
is just too cool. How else could the Realtors have to face Alaska Milk (the
``Aces'') in a sudden-death match for the last semifinals berth of the
Samsung-Philippine Basketball Association Reinforced Conference (where the
winner faced San Miguel Beer in a best-of-five)? The National Basketball
League Regional Cup is sponsored by Panasonic.

Single Lens Reflex. A kind of camera in which
the photographer sees the scene to be photographed through the same lens
system that the camera uses to produce an image on the film. A series of
mechanical linkages move a mirror system out of the way of the film for the
time a photograph is being taken.

The econonomic sense of slump is an Americanism, like that of boom, q.v.

slush pile

Collection of unsolicited manuscripts. Every publishing house -- yeah,
every imprint -- has one. For the most part they are read, or examined, or
glanced at, by the most junior editor-like personnel. Most unsolicited
manuscripts are rejected, and returned if they came with an adequate
SASE. Most that are rejected are rejected after a
cursory examination, and rightly so. Most of them aren't even bad in a way
interesting enough to merit consideration for the
BLFC. Probably most unsolicited manuscripts that
are eventually accepted somewhere are first rejected elsewhere at least a few
times. (Someone eventually makes a mistake.)

In order to get published, you want to avoid having your manuscript fly
directly over the transom and into the slush pile. In order to avoid having
your precious manuscript land in the slush pile, you need to have an agent.
But in order to have an agent, you need to get published. Therefore, it's no
fair! Obviously, no one is ever published unless they've been published
before. Hence, there is no moment in the past when they were not published, or
they couldn't have gotten an agent and been published in the first place.
Thus, every author was always a published author. What we have here is clearly
a being/becoming distinction, a heck of an ontological problem, and a lot of
empty chairs at the PEN convention. Fortunately,
there is
something called the ``First (independent) Clause Argument'' that straightens
all this stuff out, and incidentally proves that God (the First Author) really
wrote the Bible, because the big publishing houses said it would never sell and
Moses couldn't have afforded the fees that a vanity press would have charged.

But slush in general is not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk
about The Educators' Phrase Book: A Complete Reference Guide, by someone
who is far better off anonymous than she knows. The book was published by
International Scholars
Publications in 1998, when that was based in San Francisco, London, and
especially Bethesda, but as of 2005 its domain name is for sale. If that
doesn't tell you something, here's another bad sign: the dedication is missing
a comma but includes an exclamation mark. Here's the last paragraph of the
introduction, to explain what the book is all about.

At last! Here is a helpful phrase book to assist teachers and educators as
they tackle those spur of the moment reports they are writing late at night
when their ideas are running low. Many times a short phrase can help an
educator get his or her creative process rolling to complete the report before
the rushed deadline. This book with over 1,000 educational phrases can assist
educators for years in writing both formal and informal papers.

Chapter One is about curriculum phrases. I'm sorry, it is Curriculum
Phrases. Here are the first three lines of the chapter:

an effective curriculum matches
curriculum frameworks are helpful for teachers
curriculum development is essential

The chapter concludes thus:

it took hours to develop the curriculum project

Here are two random good ones from ``Chapter Two Behavioral Phrases'':

the student's behavior was revengeful
the students hall behavior was orderly

The only thing it's missing (besides left margins, punctuation, organization,
acquaintance with the English language, and a clue) is page numbers along the
right-hand side, and it could be the index to something magnificently tedious.
I'm afraid to go to sleep. I know I'll have nightmares about zombies who find
this book useful. (In the other hand: an abridged dictionary!) I'll sell the
concept and it will be turned into a major motion picture: ``Late Evening of
the Nondead Educators and, Teachers.''
Tagline: ``He or she will kill you by the method of unasked for suffocation.''
Tony Randall will return from the dead to costar with Brad Pitt (a stunt double
will play the scenes where the Pitt character has to express living human
emotions).

S.L.U.T., SLUT

South Lake Union Trolley. This is the popular name, and S.L.U.T. is the
popular initialism, for a service in Seattle, Wash., that went into operation
in late 2007. The trolley serves the neighborhoods of Cascade, Denny Park, and
Denny Triangle, a region the operating company (Vulcan, Inc.) calls South Lake
Union. The official name of the mass transportation vehicle is ``South Lake
Union Streetcar.'' This was either devious guerrilla marketing genius, or just
plain stupid, I'm not sure which. In August or September of 2007, Kapow!
Coffee -- a shop in the Cascade neighborhood -- sold out a hundred ``Ride the
S.L.U.T.'' tee shirts in a few days.

Many gentlemen and ladies who advertise in the personals express an
interest in ``S&M.'' This is evidence for the widespread latent
interest in Science and Technology, and the importance that ordinary
citizens place on this shared interest when choosing a partner for life.
Or even for a night. Sure! Cf.B&D,
S/M.

Shape Memory Alloy. When deformed cold and then warmed, an object made
from SMA recovers its previous shape. As have
thixotropic materials, SMA's have been
proposed for
robot grippers. Ti-Ni alloy is the best known, but...

Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!

Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding!!!!!!!

[Caution: Do not syncopate. Read as
``Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding.'' The Stammtisch is
not responsible for pelvic injury resulting from improper use of this
glossary!]

Right here, right now, for your viewing pleasure, et cetera,
we present, for the first time ever on the internet of this planet,
a scientific discovery announced electronically before publication.
(Previous announcements don't count because some were false and others
would adversely affect our claim of priority.)

The discovery is simply and stunningly this:

Coke is a shape memory alloy.

That's right, it goes flat when warmed.

Sorry.

SMA

Single Mode Approximation.

Sm-A

Smectic-A phase. A smectic phase of liquid crystal that has no ordering
within each plane or sheet of oriented molecules. The molecules are
oriented perpendicular to the plane of the layer. Cf.Sm-C

SMALL CAPital letters. Refers to a font in which lower-case characters are
represented by smaller versions of upper case letters, or a letter in such a
font. In Cyrillic alphabets, lower case is small caps.

A phrase patterned after Rudyard Kipling's original ``White Man's Burden.''
Isaac Asimov appears to have been the first to formulate it.

Teaching.

SMASE

Systems Management Application Service Element.

SMB

Server Message Block.

SMB

Small-to-Medium-size Business.

Sm-B

Smectic-B phase. A smectic phase of liquid crystal that has
positional long-range ordering within each plane.
This is almost, but not quite, three-dimensional crystalline ordering; the
pattern of molecules in one layer is not aligned with the pattern in the
next.

System Management Bus. Defined by
Intel Corporation in 1995, used in mobile and desktop personal computers for
low-speed communication within the system.

SMC

Saint Mary's College. A women's
college across Rt. 33/Bus. 31/SR 933/Dixie Way from
Notre Dame. In 1971, ND president Father Theodore
Hesburgh announced a planned ND-SMC merger for the 1972-73 academic year --
prematurely, it turned out. The two schools could not come to agreement on
terms, and Father Hesburgh decided to take ND co-ed on its own. Here's a poorly written
article about it that nevertheless has some interesting and probably
correct information.

In the 108th Congress (2003-2005), 62 of the 435 representatives were women, as
was one of the nonvoting delegates. Two of the representatives, and the
delegate from the US Virgin Islands, are alumnae of SMC. The USVI delegate (Donna Christensen) was the first female
physician to serve in the US Congress, a fortiori the first black woman
physician in Congress, and the first woman to represent an offshore territory.
Eddie Bernice Johnson became the first woman and the first black to ever
represent the Dallas area in Congress when she was first elected to Congress in
1992. SMC typically graduates about 400 students each year.

There were also four Notre Dame alumni in Congress. ND typically awards about
2500 bachelor's degrees each year, but at least a couple of these four men were
graduates of the law school.

Small Magellanic Cloud. The smaller of the two Magellanic Clouds. (The
other is the LMC; you can guess what that stands
for.) Both are irregular dwarf galaxies that are part of the local group of
galaxies that the Milky Way is part of.

Sm-C

Smectic-C phase. A smectic phase of liquid crystal that has no ordering
within each plane or sheet of oriented molecules. This phase differs from
Sm-A in the orientation of molecules: molecules are
aligned within a layer (i.e. are parallel to each other) but the
orientation axis of the molecules is oblique to the plane of their layer.

SMC

Southwestern Michigan College.
``SMC offers a top quality college experience, and we're closer and more
affordable than you think.'' Ten minutes from Clay High School, according to
the postcard, and I would estimate fifteen minutes from Saint Mary's College
(SMC).

Southwestern Michigan is a community college with campuses in Dowagiac
and Niles. I've heard ``Dowagiac'' pronounced on
the weather reports. It sounds like ``duh-WAH-jack.'' Niles is closer anyway.
(That's ``if you're within the sound of my voice,'' of course. Hello?
HELLO!!?)

Small { and | to } Medium[-sized] Enterprises. Not just small enterprises.
We wouldn't want to imply that the businesses we are discussing are ... small.
We don't want to trample anyone's self-esteem. In fact, even the current term
has its problems. Committees are hard at work constructing a new one to
replace it. When they finally come up with the new term, it will be SMLSE --
``small, medium, and large small enterprises.''

Smekkleysa SM is one of Iceland's
major media companies. It was started primarily as a record label in 1986, and
that is still its main business, but it also publishes poetry books, videos,
and greeting cards, and markets some gifts.

The company does business in Iceland under its original name of Smekkleysa, but
at some point it changed its official name to English: `Bad Taste, Ltd.' or
`Bad Taste SM, Ltd.' (I only have obvious guesses as to what the SM stands
for.) `Bad taste' is a fair translation of smekkleysa, which is more
literally translated as `tastelessness.'

Let's have some pointlessly gory detail. Icelandic smakk- and
smekk- roots are cognate with the English word smack (as in
``to smack one's lips''). Smakka means `to taste' (like the German verb
smecken; more about that at SMEX) and
smekkr is a noun meaning `taste' (like the German Geschmack).
In fact, there are no early attestations for either word, and the Oxford
Icelandic-English dictionary says for smekkr that it's ``from Germ.
ge-smack'' and implies that it was borrowed from some version of Middle
German. On the other hand, the entries (in the 1956 edn. which is the latest I
have to hand) haven't been modified since the original 1874 edition; maybe
someone has thought more deeply about this since.

The -less ending of English (-los of German) apparently
corresponds to -laus in Icelandic (hence smekklaus, `tasteless').
It seems that -lessness corresponds to -leys[V] with [V] some
vowel (a or i, at least); if this has a West Germanic cognate or parallel, I
don't recognize it.

Smekkleysa also uses the name ``Bad Taste Records.'' (The homepage of the
website, linked at the top of this entry, has ``Bad Taste Records -- Online
Store'' as the content of its <title> tag.) This usage is a head-on
namespace collision with a Swedish record label (namely,
Bad Taste Records). This is
reminiscent of the Samuel Butler situation in English literature. The poet
(1612-1680) and the novelist (1835-1902) are now distinguished by the titles of
famous works: Samuel (``Hudibras'') Butler and Samuel (``Erewhon'') Butler,
resp. Perhaps the Reykjavik-based label could be distinguished as Bad Taste
Records (``The Sugarcubes'') for the group that is responsible for the label's
existence. The Bad Taste Records based in Lund, Sweden, is not so closely
associated with any single group.

We'll have more about The Sugarcubes later, eventually, maybe. A work more in
line with ``bad taste'' is a children's song whose title means
`the farting people' in English,
published by this label in a 1997 album.
Bad Taste Ltd. uses as its symbol a pig listening to a trumpet or two. The
reputed origin of the name, however, is a little more elevated: it's a
reference to a reputed quote of Pablo Picasso: ``Good taste and frugality are
the enemies of creativity.'' I haven't found any specific source for this or
any similar quote. More frequently attributed is ``Ah, good
taste--What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.'' Common in
Spanish:

``El principal enemigo de la creatividad es el buen gusto.''

``El gusto es el enemigo de la creatividad.''

SMEMA

Surface Mount Equipment Manufacturers'
Association. Coördinates
compatibility of assembly equipment, even standardizing such things as the
height of working zonesabove the floor, so that conveyor systems for
equipment from different manufacturers can be meshed.

``The SMERF promotes the highest quality education and research within the
field of sleep medicine...''

This is good to know. I thought maybe they promoted mediocre and plain bad
education and research outside the field of sleep medicine, and that they put
``sleep medicine'' in their name only so it would rhyme with smurf. In
fact, they don't say that they don't promote lower-quality work. Maybe
``highest-quality education and research'' is only the tip of the iceberg.
Maybe they sell novelties as a sideline to support the research.

``This is accomplished through consultation with representatives of the AASM,
industry, and the public. The SMERF integrates their recommendations to develop
initiatives for the advancement of the field.''

Russian abbreviation of SMERt' SHpionam, meaning `death to spies.'
(The second word is sometimes written shpionom. This is the spelling of
the cognate in Polish, which is written in Roman characters. The Cyrillic
character for the last vowel in the Russian word looks like a lower-case Roman
a, and is pronounced like the o in American ``nominate'' or the a in ``father''
(or in the more accurate pronunciations of ``Viet Nam'').

SMERSH was a Soviet Army counter-espionage organization begun on April 19,
1943, and reorganized out of existence during Spring 1946. The name was
popularized in English by the novels of Ian Fleming, but in most of the James
Bond movies it is replaced by an independent criminal organization called
S.P.E.C.T.R.E., q.v. For other,
mostly fictional bad guys' organizations, see the bad guys' organizations entry.

SMES

Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage. Storage of energy as the field
energy of superconducting magnets. Something intended for use as a sort of
magnetic flywheel: an energy storage medium that could be drawn down very
quickly (but nondestructively).

SMall EXplorer. NASA's ``Small Explorer (SMEX) Program [originally
provided, according to the old
webpage] frequent flight opportunities for highly focused and relatively
inexpensive space science missions. SMEX spacecraft [had masses of] 180 to 250
kg with orbit-average power consumption of 50 to 200
watts. Each mission [was] expected to cost approximately $35 million for
design, development, and operations through the first 30 days in orbit.'' The
current site does not highlight
such specific parameters.

In German, the word schmeckt means `tastes.' It primarily has the
senses that occur in `tastes sweet, tastes good to me' -- schmeckt
süß, schmeckt mir gut. (The latter can be shortened to
schmeckt mir, but leaving out even the indirect object is probably too
ambiguous. My mom can't remember, and I can't google, a straightforward case
of someone saying ``Es schmeckt'' to mean ``Es schmeckt gut.'')
Anyway, setting aside the idiomatic elisions, schmecken is mainly an
intransitive verb meaning `have a taste that is' and typically takes an
adjective predicate [or an adjectival predicate, as in schmeckt wie ...
(`tastes like ...')]. The narrow usage compared to English taste seems
more natural when one realizes that the word is cognate with English
smacks. Think ``smacks of'' (schmeckt nach) rather than ``smack
one's lips'' (corresponding to the German dialectal verb schmacken).

The transitive verb taste is typically translated by kosten (yes,
this also means `cost'), probieren (yes, this also has other senses), or
(much less commonly) abschmecken. According to dictionaries, one can
even use schmecken transitively, but this seems to be quite rare.
(Googling on specific inflected forms which one would most expect to be used in
this sense -- first- and second-person singular smecke, schmeckst -- one
gets a lot of hits that are borderline creepy.) Anyway, in the transitive
dictionary sense it seems to be more like `try, sample.' Yuck. One can also
use herausschmecken more precisely for `sense, perceive [a flavor],'
particularly when the flavor is unexpected or is partly masked by stronger
ones. (I.e., it has some of the sense of tease out in English.)

You know, those two paragraphs aren't a scrap of misplaced text. ``SMEX'' just
happened to remind me of ``schmeckt,'' by its approximate similarity in sound.
Of course, the similarity would be closer if schmeckt were
schmecks. It's funny: when there's a difference, you expect (unvoiced,
and therefore noninitial) s in German to correspond to t in English, and not
the other way around: besser, daß, heiß, heißen, lassen,
vergessen, was, Wasser, weiss
are (or have been)
`better, that, hot, hight, let, forget, what,
water, white.'

Yet the characteristic third-person singular (pres. indic.) ending is t in
German and s in English (hence schmeckt vs. smacks). I suppose
the reason is that the ending used to be th, which mostly stayed th in English
and evolved (depending on voicing) into d and t in German. I think I read
somewhere that Shakespeare used the -th (he doth bestride) and -s (all that
glisters) about equally. The -s was originally a Northern-English regional
variant (a reverse lisp!) that spread south. I probably ought to research this
more carefully, but since you came here to learn about SMEX, you probably
wouldn't appreciate the effort.

In May 2002, an apparent intellectual and moral imbecile named Lucas Helder
drove around the US placing pipe bombs in streetside mailboxes. After his
arrest in Nevada, he told police he had planned to distribute the pipe bombs so
as to make a smiley face on a map of the US. In video showing him being taken
between jail and court in Reno, his face was all smiley. He faces charges in
Iowa that carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Man, you want to stay far from the kitchen if that stuff approaches
the smoke point.

Smith Chart

A nonlinear plot of the scaled complex impedance

z=(R + jX) /
Z0 ,

where R and X are resistance and reactance, and
Z0 is the characteristic impedance of a
reference transmission line (50 ohms is a nice typical value, if none
is indicated). Useful as a compact representation, as a way of
graphically calculating some transmission-line properties, and as a basis
for recognizing certain impedance trajectories parameterized by frequency.

The nonlinear plot is equivalent to an ordinary plot of the complex quantity

s = (z - 1) / (z + 1).

This particular conformal map is of the type called a linear fractional
transformation, and in addition to preserving angles it transforms all
z-plane circles (including the infinite-radius circles usually
called straight lines) into s-plane circles, and vice versa.
Zero resistance is represented in the s-plane by a circle of
radius 0.5, centered on (0.5,0). All positive resistances lie
inside this circle. Capacitive (negative) reactance corresponds to
the lower half s-plane. Similarly, inductive reactance is in the
lower half plane.

The Smithereens

A pop-rock group formed in New Jersey.

smitherinos

Now that internal structure has been detected in quarks, we should
seize the opportunity to name the next layer of sub-particles smitherinos
and smitherons, the whole family to be called smithereens. We mustn't miss
the chance, because there may not be any more
turtles.

SMoke & fOG. Haze of at least partly
human origin, as modified by chemical reactions in the sky and sun. Perfectly
good term now eschewed by the environmentally hip. Instead, for a while they
were trying to get us to call it ozone, even though that's only one
component.

smog, to

The verb to smog is in common use, at least in California as of
2004, with the sense of ``to have [a motor vehicle] inspected for compliance
with emissions laws.'' I wouldn't know, because -- please fasten your seat
belt and brace yourself to enter a time warp --
Indiana has no emissions inspections. No motor
vehicle inspections whatever. Yuh pays yer taxes and yuh gets yer
license-plate sticker. That's it. Credit cards and personal checks accepted.
I imagine that there are laws requiring your low-beams not to be focused at
the rear-view mirror of the car ahead, but I can see that those are not
enforced.

Mary says that if you're illiterate, the Indiana State DMV will assign someone
to read you the questions so can take the ``written'' part of the driving test.
I don't know how she found this out. Was it written somewhere? What
provisions do they make to assist those who are blind and deaf to take the
test?

smoke

This is the crucial ``working fluid'' of electronics. If you let the
smoke out of your circuit, you'll have a hard time getting it back in, or
getting the circuit to work again.

smokestack lightning

When a train goes by, silhouetted against a dark sky, you could see the
sparks in the smoke trailing close behind the chimney. That's ``smokestack
lightning.'' It's not lightning, and it's not sparks in the narrowest sense,
but floating embers from the engine fire. Those embers drafted almost the
entire length of the engine car: from the firebox just forward of the
engineer's compartment, along the inside of a fire tube through the boiler, to
the smokebox and out the chimney at the front of the engine. Ideally,
external combustion engines aren't intended to be quite so external. In
practice, train-engine chimneys were broad to accomodate baffles meant to
suppress smokestack lightning.

Chester Arthur Burnett wrote a song he called ``Smokestack Lightning.'' As
appropriate for an artist with the stage name of
Howlin' Wolf, the song has a lot of
howling. In this song, some of the howling is a pun: ``whoo hoo, whoo hoo''
might be the crying of a child or the whistle of a train. Howlin' Wolf
recorded the song in 1956 (it was pressed with the title written as three
words). If you're like me, the version you remember best is the Yardbirds'
(their second cover of it, with mostly new lyrics). The song was also covered
by (in no particular order) Manfred Mann, The Animals, the Rolling Stones, Bob
Dylan, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, John Hammond, The Electric Prunes, Lynyrd
Skynyrd, the Grateful Dead, The Who, The Wailers, George Thorogood and the
Destroyers, Soundgarden, and many less famous others. Okay, some probably not
less famous than John Hammond. The Cult had a hit with ``Fire Woman,'' and
``smokestack lightning'' is prominent in the chorus of that song. (They might
have been more successful if they'd had the sense to make the song's hook its
title. I imagine that if you go to school in Nashville, you learn this in
second grade.)

You say you never saw smokestack lightning? Hmmm, by 1956 I imagine even
Howlin' Wolf was writing from memory. His years were from June 10, 1910 (I
must have missed the retrospective), to January 10, 1976, so he witnessed the
end of the steam age.

Eventually, I want to find connections to link up all the entries in this
glossary, in a Six Degrees of
Kevin Bacon-type thing. It doesn't always work through the most obvious
connection. For example, though I suppose Burnett was named after Chester Alan
Arthur, the 21st US president, I can't think of any really good tie-in there.
Sorry. I guess Chester Arthur witnessed the rise and heyday of the steam age.
Pending a future Wolfman Jack entry, I'll note that the inspiration for that
famous disc jockey came from Howlin' Wolf. Wolfman Jack's legal name was
Robert Weston Smith. With a little sympathetic misspelling, that links us to
the Smith and Wesson Oil entry.

smoking

A word that means `tuxedo' (American English) or evening jacket (British)
in many European languages, including at least
German (capitalized, like all nouns),
French,
Italian, and
Spanish. (In Spanish, however, the
pronunciation now follows the naturalized spelling, esmoquin.)
Evidently this sense is derived from the English term `smoking jacket.'
(Perhaps because of the ellipsis, the Hachette Dictionnaire Universel
Francophone tags this a faux anglicisme.)

In principle, I suppose this could also become a
faux ami, but I don't think ``No Smoking''
signs cause any genuine confusion. What can cause confusion is the
original English term, which has two meanings that are now essentially
inconsistent: (1) a jacket for formal evening wear in public, (2) an
elegant but comfortable jacket for home wear. If you conjure in your mind a
well-to-do men's smoking club of the Victorian era, with an ostensibly relaxed
atmosphere, then the double image begins to converge.

SMOP

Small Matter Of Programming.

Everything is easy for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.

SMOP

Standard Monkey Operating Procedure. If you were a monkey, you'd do it
this way too. Also abbreviated SOP.

SMOW

Standard Mean Ocean Water. As in 18O SMOW concentration.

SMP

Service Management Point.

SMP

Society of Modern
Psychoanalysts. ``The mission of the Society of Modern Psychoanalysts is
to foster training, research and dissemination of information among a broad
spectrum of individuals interested in Modern Psychoanalysis.''

From the ``About
Modern Psychoanalysis'' page: Modern psychoanalysis ``rests upon the
theoretical framework and clinical approach of Sigmund Freud, who defined
clinical psychoanalysis as any line of investigation that takes transference
and resistance as the starting point of its work. As psychoanalytic practice
and theory developed, psychoanalysts began to doubt the applicability of
classical psychoanalytic technique to the treatment of narcissistic disorders.
Interpretation, the mainstay of classical technique, proved ineffective in the
treatment of severe pathologies.

In the mid forties, Hyman Spotnitz--working as supervisor with a
group of mental health professionals at the Jewish Board of
Guardians--developed a systematic theory of technique designed for the
treatment of preverbal conditions. The body of theoretical and clinical
knowledge developed by Spotnitz and his colleagues, known as `Modern
Psychoanalysis,' amplified Freud's theories so as to make them applicable to
the full spectrum of emotional disorders.

Spotnitz determined that the core problem in narcissism is
self-hate rather than self-love, as previously thought.'' Huh! I bet that
selfishness will turn out to be a manifestation of excess altruism, too.
Spotnitz ``recognized the preponderance of destructive aggression in
narcissistic disorders and used it dynamically in formulating his theory of the
technique, thus also confirming the operational viability of Freud's theory of
dual drives. Spotnitz further recognized that transference phenomena include
experiences from conception through the first two years of life, in addition to
those from the oedipal [sic] period.''

SMP

Symmetric MultiProcessing.

SMPC

Shared Memory Parallel Computer.

SMPS

Switched-Mode Power Supply. One way to produce AC power from a DC source.

Short Message Service. Sends snippets of text to mobile phones, so
you don't have to tie up your pager. That's a joke. It's a both a two-way
and broadcast-mode system, up to 160 bytes in GSM
standard. Here's one
of many free SMS service sites.

School Mathematics Study Group. The 1960's math committee corresponding to
PSSC for physics, BSCS for biology, and CHEM Study for chemistry. These
committees, reflecting or riding a degree of remanent Sputnik panic, set out to
improve science education in US high schools. They produced new curricula,
textbooks, and audio-visual materials.

SMT

Society for Music Theory.
Founded in 1977, ``[t]he Society holds annual meetings, publishes two journals
(Music Theory Spectrum and Music Theory Online), and encourages scholarly
excellence by giving awards for outstanding publications in music theory. We
also work to increase the diversity of our discipline and to promote fruitful
exchanges between music theorists, musicologists, performers, and scholars in
other fields.''

Postal code for Saxony (Sachsen in German), one of the
sixteen states (Länder) of the German Federal Republic (FRG). [Like most of the country information in this
glossary, Germany's is at the domain code .de.]

Its area is 18,413 sq. km. I admit this is not a very interesting fact, but
it's a datum that doesn't change as fast as the population, so there's less
updating for me to do. Just for historical interest, the population of Saxony
was estimated at 4,538,000 for 1997. The capital of the state, through various
forms of government, has been and continues to be Dresden.

The names Saxony and Sachsen (and Anglo-Saxon, for that matter) come from the
German people called Saxons, whose name is supposed to be derived from the Old
German sahsa, `dagger,' the weapon they favored in battle. (In contrast
with Germanni, I guess, who favored the gari, `spear.') The
Finnish name for German is Saksa, from Saxon.

In Latin, German was Germanus. It was a pun
on germanus, which meant `sibling.' (The word apparently evolved from
germen, `seed, germ.') Just like English, Latin has distinct words for
sibling, brother (frater, a cognate) and sister (soror). I guess
a co-ed frat should be a germanity. In fact, there was a Latin word
germanitas, which we would render as ``germanity,'' and which had a
meaning like that. Germanitas was synonymous with fraternitas,
and these words had the sense of our word fraternity in the abstract rather
than the ``Greek'' sense.

Like English and Latin, German also has a distinct word for sibling
(Geschwister) in addition to Bruder and Schwester. The
situation in Latin is not quite parallel to that in these Germanic languages,
however. Latin nouns have grammatical gender, as German does. However, gender
in Latin typically (as in this instance) is systematically related to (and
frequently identifiable from) an interchangeable morphology of suffixes.
The history of grammatical gender, or more generally noun classes, is quite
involved. Old High German (the highland German that became modern German) and
Old English (Anglo-uh, Saxon, evolved from lowland or ``Low German''
languages) had more extensive gender, with inflections marking the nouns as
well as their modifiers. None of that is left in English, and very little in
German. In Latin, however, the system was sufficiently visible in the
morphology that it was easy to preserve a distinction between natural gender
(like, male in the case of brother, understand?) and grammatical gender (the
ship, she is ready for Mr. sea). Now the Romans weren't silly about this, and
with a few traditional exceptions, nouns with a natural gender had the same
grammatical gender. Frater, for example, was male. Siblings, on the
other hand, come in at least two flavors. As it happens, the Latin sibling
word is grammatically male. (The corresponding German word Geschwister
is female.)

But there's more. When a word functions as an adjective, it must assume a gender consistent with that
of the noun. It must ``agree'' with the noun. (From the linguistic point of
view, it is the requirement of agreement that defines noun classes in the usual
sense.) In a word like germanus (or Germanus), the male and
female forms are distinguished. Thus, the male adjective form (identical with
the noun) occurs in one Latin translation of brotherly love: germanus
amor because amor is male. (I'm not going to try to make the
argument that this is an instance of of natural gender, but it can be related
to the fact that the personification of Eros or Amor is male.) On the other
hand, a female noun like caritas (`expensiveness'; it evolved to have
the usual sense of `dearness') demands a female form: germana caritas
for `brotherly high price' or something. Caritas is the origin of our
word charity (Middle English charite, from the Old French word
used in the sense of `Christian love'; charity is caridad in Spanish). And they say that money is the root of
all evil. They should be poor and they'll know better. Another female example
is malignitas, so germana malignitas would be `brotherly spite'
or `brotherly stinginess.' Gee, those Romans took a very practical approach to
affections. (I mean ``practical'' here in the subcontinent sense, as explained
at the efectivo entry.) I'm not going
to go on like this endlessly. I'm not even going to inflict so much as a
pocket dictionary of nouns, but I will mention that there's a neuter form
(e.g., germanum odium -- more `brotherly spite,' just to be fair
and balanced).

I know, I know: you're sorry you asked. But take heart -- the end of the entry
is scrolling into view! The point of introducing the differently gendered (in
a non-modern sense) forms of germanus was to show that there was of
necessity a female form germana parallel to it. So the Romans put that
to good use as a substantive (i.e what we call noun, q.v.)
as well as an adjective. But they already had a word for sister. Instead,
germana came to mean `own sister,' and then, of course, germanus
had to mean `own brother,' and germanum `own palm-pilot.'

That's the order in which it happened. I know because I was there at the time.
You can find most of the meanings in a dictionary, or even a glossary. Then
again there's disagreement. Etymology, shmetymology. It turns out that the
affective sense of caritas (and its etymon carus) may well have
been the principal sense before the pecuniary sense. The word has an
identifiable root in Proto-Indo-European: *ka (earlier *ke). That's supposed
to have meant `love.' Sounds a bit curt to me. Not mellifluous enough. Other
cognates include (through a circuitous route through Old Norse) the English
word whore. Okay, even setting aside phonology, maybe that's not the
best example. It still seems to have a, dare I say it, meretricious element.
Okay, better example: Sanskrit kama, as in the title of the work Kama
Sutra (videcama). Here
kama definitely means `love,' or, er, maybe just `desire.' Hmmm.
All I can say is, LOVE STINKS! Love stinks -- yeah, yeah! Come to
think of it, I can probably say other things.

The history of germanus is not
uncontroversial either. In addition to the meanings given above, the
adjective was widely used with the meaning of `genuine.' Most references I've
consulted regard that as a transferred sense, although it's not obvious how.
Corominas y Pascual takes the
position that `genuine' was the original meaning, and that the meaning
`brother' arose from expressions like frater germanus. That halps
explain the connection between the different senses of germanus, but
leaves germen out in the cold.

If this were an entry for germanus, rather than for the Saxony postal
code, I would probably at least mention the Spanish word hermano, and
Herman, and the Hermits. Hermano and hermana are the Spanish
words for `brother' and `sister,' derived from the ablative forms of
germanus.

Herman is a Germanic given name (so maybe I should call it a Vorname).
Judging from the fact that Herr Mann means `Mr. Man' in modern German,
and her man means whatever it means in English, I'd would have to say
that Herman (and related names like Hermann in German and
Ermanno in Italian) means `He-man.' But I would be wrong. Not that
I'd be alone in error. Back in the nineteenth century, the names Herman and
Hermann had a spurt of popularity in the US, UK, and Germany. This seems to
have had to do with the belief that the name was an alternate form of Armin,
called Arminius by Tacitus. Armin (d. 21 CE) led the Cherusci to a
tremendous victory against Roman armies at Teutoburgerwald (`German fortress
forest'?) in 9 CE, after which Rome pretty much abandoned efforts to
establish control east of the Rhine. A Dictionary of First Names
(Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, 1990)
has somewhat contradictory claims about the Armin-Hermann connection (at the
Hermann and Armin entries). I'm going to assert firmly that
they're not closely related, because such a vague claim, within the uncertain
field of etymology, is virtually impossible to falsify. There is wide
agreement, for whatever that might be worth, that Hermann is derived from the
Germanic roots hari (`army') and man (`man'). That sort of
brings us back to the beginning of the entry. (Remember sahsa?)

Well, as long as I've mentioned Armin, I should mention Arnim (clean your
glasses). Lady von Arnim was a good friend of Goethe, and her son was one of
the last visitors to his deathbed. I recall this from Eckerman's book (no, I
didn't give bibliographical information on the book earlier in this entry; you
should simply be familiar with the book; see the SAH
entry). Arn occurs in Yiddish as a shortened form of Aaron, and if the
plural were formed in Hebrew it would be Arnim. This is most likely just a
coincidence, but since I don't know the actual etymology of Arnim, you're
stuck. (There's also an English Arn -- like Arnie, short for Arnold -- but I
don't know how to stick im in there.) Okay, okay! Enough about Saxony,
already!

Stannum. This is the Late Latin name for tin, atomic
number 50. Before the sixth century, stannum referred to an alloy of
silver and lead. (It's not exactly a naturally occurring alloy, but it's
natural the term should arise: silver was extracted as an impurity from galena,
a lead sulfide.)

You might wonder what tin was called in Latin before it was called stannum.
Bronze (a copper-tin alloy) was very important in ancient times (and it was not
abandoned when the Iron Age succeeded the Bronze Age), so you might think the
Romans might have a distinctive name for it (just as the Greeks did:
kassiteros). In fact, the Romans called it plumbum candidum
(`white lead'). The elemental metal we call lead was plumbum nigrum
(`black lead'). (They also used the term plumbago, in the sense of
`lead ore,' for a range of similar-appearing minerals. Some of these minerals,
like graphite, are not lead ores.)

(Just to make the color-based naming more complicated: the two tin allotropes
that are stable around room temperature are gray tin (stable below
13.2°C) and white tin (stable above).

The Late Latin root stannum is used in forming the distinctive ionic
names stannous and stannic, which by current IUPAC
rules are to be written tin (II) and tin (IV). You can learn more about tin at
its
entry in WebElements and
its entry at
Chemicool.

SN

SuperNova[e]. Plural also written SNe. The conventional way of designating
SNe was SN<yyyy><sl>, where <yyyy> was the year during which
the event began to be observed, and <sl> was a single letter, letters
being assigned serially in alphabetical order by time of report
over the course of the
year. The best-known example is SN1987A --
evidently the first supernova reported observed in 1987. Since 1987, the
one-letter system has not been sufficient, and SNe after the twenty-sixth
(Z) have been labelled with two letters according to the positional scheme
described in the last paragraph of the AA entry.
There is a tendency to switch from upper-case single letters to lower-case
letter pairs, but this practice is not uniformly followed.

Not all SN reports turn out to be true. In 1987, twenty were reported
(SN1987A to SN1987T), but only seventeen were confirmed.

SN

Supertwisted Nematic (liquid crystal phase).

SN

Switching Network.

SNA

Somali National Alliance. Led by Mohammed Farah Aideed until he was
killed in the summer of 1996, and contending with the bad guy
SSA over which will liberate Somalia.

In the preface to Snack Food Technology (a book quoted in scattered
places in this glossary), author Samuel A. Matz, Ph.D., writes

One dictionary defines a snack as ``a slight, hasty
repast,'' while another says it is ``a mere bite or morsel of food, as
contrasted with a regular meal; a light or incidental repast.'' Possibly,
neither of these definitions satisfactorily represents current usage. I have
not found ``snack food'' in any dictionary [his
prayers are answered], but it is likely that most people would recognize a
snack food as being something consumed primarily for pleasure rather than for
social or nutritive purposes and not ordinarily used in a regular meal. Some
foods are used both as snacks and as meal
components, pizza being an obvious example. ...

For further discussion of what is and is not snack food, go to the SFA entry.

The second edition of Matz's book was published in 1984. There was also a Japanese edition. The third
edition (from which I quote) was published in 1993 (New
York: Van Nostrand Reinhold).

Matz is deliciously opinionated. At pp. 174-5 he lashes out at bagel chips:

Bagels that have been sliced into thin chips, then toasted and
flavored, have appeared on the market during the last few years. They have
achieved a certain amount of market penetration, though it is hard to see where
their appeal lies, as opposed, say, to the thin toast slices that have been
around for years. Fresh bagels have no intrinsic flavor superiority, their
acceptance relying on the usual ethnic connotation, their peculiar glossy
crust, and their firm texture, the last two points not being apparent when they
are in the toast form. Probably their novelty is the main selling point
driving this market. ...

Fool! The attraction is that it's a diet food: it's priced so dear that you
can't afford to overeat. (Also the strength-of-materials aspect of mouthfeel.)

A backronymic expansion I saw in the context of
the ongoing Eurozone sovereign-debt crisis was
``Supra National And Fiscal Union.'' It was used in a 13 December 2011 comment
in The Telegraph by Boris Johnson to describe the proposed,
not-yet-clearly-defined closer fiscal union of EU countries rejected by British
PM David Cameron the previous week. (German Chancellor Angela Merkel is saying
she likes to call it a ``stability union.'') I suppose the Snafu (in British
acronym capitalization style) expansion is Johnson's own.

Back in 1979 or so, I attended a talk by an outside speaker at Princeton
University's Psychology Department. The talk had something to do with how a
certain kind of ``snafu situation'' (yes, an aap
pleonasm) arose frequently. It didn't seem to me that she understood that
SNAFU is an acronym, let alone knew its obscene expansion.

snake eyes

A two in craps. Snake eyes on the first roll means craps: the house wins.
There's a bit of elementary detail at the
boxcars entry.

Interestingly, this is a poor metaphor because snakes may have more than two
eyes. Rattlesnakes and other ``pit vipers'' have two obvious eyes sensitive to
light in the optical spectrum. These look to the sides, however, and predator
species tend to have eyes directed forward. The rattlesnake does indeed have
such forward-pointing eyes, called pit organs. These are easy to miss: they
look through tiny slits. They are sensitive in the
infrared, and so can detect the snake's prey at night
through the animals' body heat. Ugh. It's disgusting. Anyway, even snakes
without an extra pair of eyes are reptiles, and so have a cranial opening that
is called the ``reptilian third eye.'' As it happens, however, house also wins
on trey.

Some snakes' pit organs can detect temperature differences as small as 0.01
degree.

Student Nurses' Association of Pennsylvania. Their Internet domain is
<snap-online.org>. I imagine
that for anyone who remembers the sexy Snap-on® tools wall
calendars that were hung in the auto shops and similar virtually all-male
workshops of my youth, and to some others besides, this must seem unseemly
(unseemlyly?) suggestive.

SNAP, Snap

Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power. Name for power devices used by NASA, almost all of them RTG's. Singular ``system for nuclear auxiliary power''
may seem a more natural expansion for an individual device, but the official
expansion uses the plural.

Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Belges.
French name of the Belgian National Railway `National Organization for
Belgian railRoads.'
Flemish name is Nationale Maatschappij der Belgische Spoorwegena
(NMBS).

Judith Viorst's It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty And Other Tragedies of
Married Life (1968) is a book of ``blank verse,'' which means that it's bad
prose with a ragged right margin. One of the sublime unheralded breakthroughs
of hypertext is that it makes bad prose easier to set than blank verse. Here's
the second paragraph of the poem ``In Deauville'':

In Deauville
Everyone but us
Is playing chemin de fer
The way my mother plays in the Tuesday gin club,
And buying horses
The way my father buys a good cigar
And telling the waiter the champagne smells of cork
With the assurance of those
Who have never saved trading stamps
Or attended a swim club cook-out.

In February 1960, four black students went to a Woolworth lunch counter in
Greensboro, North Carolina. Their action is often described as a sit-in, but
all they did was sit at the counter and wait to be served. It wasn't their
fault if that took a very long time. Around the country, other students tried
this experiment. Afterwards, things, including the SNCC, became more
complicated. There doesn't seem to be a <http://www.sncc.org/>.

A class of footwear that used to be easy to define when it was less
various. Generally, a sneaker is a rubber-soled shoe; hence the name, which
implies that sneakers enable one to walk quietly. With the wrong kind of
rubber on a smooth, recently-waxed floor, though, it might be better called
squeaker.

Back in the day, we wore sneakers that had simple cloth uppers and some thin
foam on a flat base (no arch support). They breathed very well, especially
after they began to fray. They came in two styles: high-top and not high-top.
When they wore out, it wasn't because the batteries died or the air valve
started to leak. And they were cheap.

Modern and post-modern sneakers are available high-tech and high-fashion.
These shoes are way over my head (which is not where I expected them to be, now
that power and phone lines run mostly under ground). When a new model is
released, it's an event. Visit this
informative site for up-to-date release event and availability information.
The site uses expert technical language like ``grey cement colorway'' that will
just knock your socks off.

One nonexpert thought on arch support, however: if you're 5'9" and weigh 350
pounds, you're probably not using the modern-day descendant of the once-humble
sneaker as a ``running shoe'' or as any other species of ``athletic shoe.'' At best it's just a
well-intentioned, much-put-upon loafer, supporting your sorry flat foot. The
shoe that would provide better arch support for you is the shoe beneath the you
that has lost weight (and misplaced it where
you won't find it again). If you can't find that shoe, with or without a
mirror, then Crusher, just forget it and save your money for that hip
replacement operation.

Sneakers are not only available in high fashion for the well-heeled, but also
in low fashion for the down-at-the-heels. That would be the
velcro version.

Yes, yes, the relevant connections to the Beatles and others will be elucidated
as time permits. (By ``others'' I mean rappers; I didn't want to defile the
previous sentence by identifying them there.)

sneakernet

A versatile, padded data transport protocol for a LAN connecting computers that are not connected. Data is
typically carried in 1.4 MB packets.

You shouldn't laugh -- sneakernet can be quite efficient. Pocket-size USB ``hard drives'' (really flash PROM's, like RFD's, but not resident) are available (as of August
2002) in 512 MB modules (and in halvings of that
size down to 16 MB).

Snellen

The name associated with eye-chart measures of visual acuity
(VA), reported as 20/20, 20/40, or in general 20/x,
where x is called the ``Snellen denominator.'' The numbers of this form
(20/20, 20/40, etc.) are usually called ``Snellen fractions'' (occasionally
``Snellen acuity fractions'') if a name is needed, and the visual acuity they
represent is called ``Snellen acuity.'' Basically, anything you can think of,
slap a ``Snellen'' on the front and you can sound as professional as a
driver's-license bureaucrat. There's even a ``Snellen's garden'' eye chart
(sorry, I meant ``Snellen chart'' of course) of letters E oriented in different
directions, for testing the VA of young children and other illiterates.

``Normal'' vision is defined as the ability to distinguish features subtending
one minute of arc at a distance of 20 feet. A word like ``feature'' might be
vague in principle, but in practice it is very precisely defined: the eye chart
contains rows of successively smaller sans-serif ``Snellen letters.'' The row
that must be readable by someone with ``normal vision'' has square letters that
(at 20 feet) are five arc-minutes high and wide, with strokes one arc-minute
wide (that is, 0.349 inches high, with strokes 0.070 inches wide).

A Snellen acuity of 20/40 is something like half the normal resolution.
Typically, someone with 20/40 vision is described as being able to read only at
20 feet what someone with normal vision can read at 40 feet. Operationally, of
course, it really means that the person can only distinguish letters at twenty
feet if they are twice as large (``features'' that are two arc-minutes wide).
The loose conventional statement would equivalent if there were no difference
in the ability to focus at 20 feet and at 40 feet. Practically speaking, the
difference is slight and the definitions are substantially equivalent.
(Changing focus from 20 to 40 feet, or from 20 feet to infinity, requires a
lens with a strength of 1/12 or 1/6 diopter, respectively.)

In general, a Snellen acuity of 20/x implies that someone can read letters at
20 feet only if the features subtend an angle equal to 20/x minutes (here
``20/x'' is to be understood simply as a fraction). There is a superscript
notation to represent intermediate visual acuity, or partial success: a Snellen
acuity of 20/30-2 represents the ability to to read all but 2 of the
letters in the 20/30 row of a Snellen eye chart. This is somewhat useful,
particularly as there is no row between those for 20/30 and 20/40 vision in the
standard chart. (Then again, it wouldn't be so hard to draw another line on
the floor or something.)

In the UK and Canada, at
least, the 20 feet have been converted to 6 meters (the difference is about the
length of a cigarette: 20 ft. = 6.096 m), hence 6/6 for
20/20, 6/9 for 20/30, etc.
In the technical literature, I've also seen the term ``Snellen decimal
fractions'' and 0.5 for 20/40, etc.

Herman Snellen,
who created his popular eye chart in 1854, was a Dutch ophthalmologist who
spent his entire career in the Netherlands. I rather suspect that he did not
define ``Snellen acuities'' in terms of traditional English feet.

SNF

Short-range Nuclear Forces.

SNF

Skilled Nursing Facility. The US government offers an official definition
in 32 CFR 199.6.

This SNF would be of limited utility in the event this other kind
of SNF is used.

SNF

Sunday Night Football. A single Sunday-night game each week of the regular
season, showcased and broadcast on ESPN.

A technical term referring to cooked food crumbs left in roasting pot,
usually moist, often fatty.
Construed plural; singular form uncertainly attested. Neologism of an
SBFer's mother, from long before `sniglets.' Synonymous with loose sense
of the Polish word skwarka. Cf.
crackling and
cracklings.

SNIF, .snif

Standard Nasal Information Format. This doesn't happen to exist yet, but
it's not too soon to coin an appropriate acronym and filename extension. After
the pattern of GIF and
GIF89, the SNIF standard (AAP pleonasm
alert) will be extended to include ``transparent'' smells that can't be directly
detected by olfaction, but which are apparent by the fact that they allow other
odors to be smelled ``through'' them.

SNIFF

Standard Nasal Information File Format. After the pattern of TIFF. An alternative to
SNIF.

sniper

An individual who shoots from concealment. The name derives from the
snipe, a long-billed marsh bird typically hunted from a blind. To snipe
was to hunt snipe...

SNIT

Supplemental Corporation Net Income Tax. An Indiana state tax that used to
be assessed on a corporation's net income derived from sources in Indiana.
This tax was repealed in 2003. The basic Indiana corporate income tax is now
AGIT, q.v.

StriNg-Oriented
symBOlic Language. Provides run-time typing, garbage collection, user data
types, on-the-fly compilation. Old-style language (first created in 1962) --
apparently no structured-programming constructs in any updated version. Simple syntax compared to Perl, but that's not really saying much, is it? Has
been described by actual enthusiasts as a string-oriented version of
COBOL. It's not a complimentary comparison.
(However, the languages are unrelated. Hence, this enthusiasts' claim is false
as well as defamatory. That's why I claim at the COBOL entry that COBOL has
been calumniated.) SPITBOLis related.

A toilet-bowl cleaner that is basically hydrochloric acid (to dissolve
rust) with a few aryl and alkyl ammonium chlorides (which ought to act as
detergents, or at least as surfactants). Presumably the name
SNO BOL® is chosen to suggest a snowy-white toilet bowl.

English term is derived from German Schnorchel, meaning `air intake,
snorkel' as extensions of its original and still valid meaning `snort.'
Schnorchel in turn is a diminutive (the -el ending) noun formed from
the verb schnorchen, a cognate of English snore (the standard
form in German is now schnarchen).

Another instance of the -el diminutive ending that is well-known in English is
the Yiddish (like Middle High German) shtetl (< shtet + -el,
cf. Ger. Stadt, noting that initial ``st'' in German has a
pronunciation that would be written ``sht'' in English). The normative form
form in modern German uses the -chen diminutive ending: Städtchen.
(The the stem-changed vowel ä is close in sound to the e in shtetl, but
Yiddish and German vowels seem to coincide largely by coincidence.)

SNOS

Scanning Near-Field Optical Spectroscopy.

snow blowers

People who need a snow blower eventually mount it prominently on an
open trailer for its final mission and head south. When somebody asks
what that thang is mounted on their trailer, they know they've reached
the promised land.

There are whole retirement villages in Venezuela, founded by North Dakotans
who raced through west Texas and didn't understand
Spanish.

One Stammtisch member who has not risked living in Venezuela remembers the
cover of a Saturday Evening Post, from around 1939 -- before he
discovered the New Yorker -- which showed a model T being heaved
out of the snow and off the road by a monster snow plow.
There's more information on the model T at the
Barbie Doll entry.

SNP

Scottish National Parliament.

SNP

Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism.

SNQP

Simple Nomenclator Query Protocol.

SNR

Signal-to-Noise Ratio. ``Ess en arr'' and ``sine arr'' pronunciations
are both common. All devices have noise at some level, even with no
signal in. Roughly speaking, a voltage amplifier has zero-current voltage
fluctuations (noise in the absence of signal), resistance fluctuations (a
source of linear noise) and nonlinear noise. Thus, SNR is generally not
constant. Cf.SINAD. Oh wait, that's
supra, just a couple o'hundred entries back... you probably already
read it. Sorry.

SNR

SuperNova Remnant.

SNS

Secondary Network Server.

SNS

Shomron News Service. It began as ``SNS Service,'' which may, for all know
have been an official AAP pleonasm. It then
became in turn the Shomron News Service, IINS (Israel Internet News Service),
IsraelWire, and most recently that I am aware of, INN, whose expansion I can
guess but don't know. It appears to be defunct. It was a non-profit, probably
one-reporter organization that provided news about Israel in English. There
appear to be a few other news organizations that are willing to pick up some of
the slack.

Doubtless the proficiency of SNS students varies greatly (see this other SNS entry), but I think these programs
could be very useful. They didn't exist at my junior high school 30+ years
ago. I took 9th-grade (i.e., third year) Spanish when I was in I was in
8th grade, against the resistance of the school administration. (They thought
I would be unprepared, as I had had no previous formal Spanish instruction
since kindergarten in Argentina.) The course was a poor fit. I did learn a
few new words, and I gained the ability to name some of the grammatical
categories I had always used naturally, but my time could have been better
spent.

In the class as we were originally arranged, ``Elena'' sat behind me. On one
early test, she got a grade of F with the notation ``you haven't learned this
yet.'' The seating was rearranged.

SNS

Spanish Native Speaker[s]. Native speaker[s] of
Spanish. The US has many, but a lot of them
learned it poorly at home in the US. You hear many of these on
Spanish-language US TV news interviews and they have obvious fluency, yet they
sound like gringos.

SNS

Spanish for Native Speakers. Programs and
materials for the teaching of Spanish to some of the speakers described in the previous entry.

Students for the New Urbanism. The Cub Scout or Brownie version of the
CNU.

SNUR

Significant New Use Rule. A rule concerning standards for the use of
substances deemed safe within a particular context, but not in general.

SN1987A

SuperNova observed in 1987. The first one that year, hence ``A.''
Observed beginning on Feb. 23, 1987. Only twelve million light years away,
it was the most spectacular and scientifically useful one in years.

Split-Off (electronic band). In typical semiconductors, the valence band
consists of heavy and light hole bands (i.e., hole bands with energies
varying slowly and quickly with crystal momentum), and an SO band. At zero
crystal momentum, symmetry considerations make the light and heavy hole bands
degenerate, but the SO band has an energy lowered by the spin-orbit coupling.

Semiconductor Optical Amplifier. Signals transmited along optical
cable have to be reamplified every few (say 100) km.

SOA

Service Order Administration.

SOA

Service-Oriented Architecture.

SOA

Slow Outdiffuser Approximation.

SoA

Society of Authors. ``...
the leading association for writers of fiction and non-fiction in the
United Kingdom. Its members also include artists,
illustrators, playwrights, and scriptwriters (for both radio and television).''

Snakes On A Plane. A silly and
tolerably scary movie with no trailers, no critic previews, a title that
honestly announces: ``this is a silly and tolerably scary movie,'' and a year
of the kind of free web publicity that only truth-in-labeling can buy. Samuel
L. Jackson plays an FBI agent trying to protect a
witness from a menagerie of somewhat realistic computer-generated dangerous
snakes. A movie that was ``made'' by the Internet in more ways than one. In
response to Internet buzz and expectations, new dialogue and scenes (a
gratuitous sex scene and more gore) were added before the premiere on August
17, 2006. Could this be the Rocky Horror Picture Show of the 21st century?
Will Samuel L. Jackson become Tim Curry?

SOuthBOund Train. An Israeli jazz group. They have been first-prize
winners at the St. Petersburg Blues Festival. The members are Assaf Ganzman
and Daniel Kriman, and a variable set of others, making a quartet or trio. As
of May 2003, they were a trio with Eli ``Fish'' Gundman. Do I have this entry
here because of the mishpoche? Because cousin Alex visited the St. Petersburg
family when he was a student in Finland? Nah -- it's just the coincidence that
Daniel is part of ``Southbound'' and I am in South Bend. (My original middle
name was Daniel. I changed it later.)

Assaf Ganzman met Daniel Kriman at ``Mike's Place'' in Jerusalem. Assaf and
his brother Gil bought it from founder Mike Vigoda in 1995. In 2000 they
opened a Tel Aviv ``Mike's Place'' on Herbert Samuel street, on a walkway along
the Tel Aviv beach. It's in the Russian Compound in the city, and close to the
US Embassy. It's the main club for the city's small Blues scene. Mike's Place
and Strudel are the two bars in the city that cater to a mostly
English-speaking clientele. Teens and kids in their twenties. (To me that's
``kids,'' okay? Don't gimme this YA-YA BuSiness.)

About 1 AM on April 30, 2003, with the club in Tel Aviv full of kids dancing to
the live music, a couple of British citizens were denied entry. Only one of
them was able to set off his bomb belt. The other ran off and was later found
drowned in the Mediterranean. One waitress and two musicians were killed,
dozens were injured.

SOC, SoC

Silicon On Ceramic.

SOC

Span Of Control. The number of subordinates reporting to a supervisor.

SOC

System On a Chip. Contrasted with SOB.
Of course, the system that's all on a chip is still on a chip that's usually on
a circuitboard, just like the system that's ``on [a] board.'' The advantages
of not leaving the chip package are lower power, higher speed, better
integration and lower costs, for all the obvious reasons. The ``system''
referred to may be a subsystem doing only part of the data processing in a
product (it might be a graphics engine, say).

The earliest solid-state electronic calculators each used several thousand
transistors and diodes. The first LSI-based
calculator was made around 1970 by a joint Rockwell-Sharp project and used four
LSI chips. Nowadays pocket calculators use a single chip for all calculation
and display signal generation.

SOCAL

Standard Oil of California. One of the companies
formed from the antitrust breakup of Standard Oil (Esso ... Exxon).

so-called

This word in English carries a skeptical connotation -- the speaker
or writer using this word is expressing doubt about the truthfulness of
claims implied by the naming. [E.g.: The emperor's new so-called `clothes'
(but see FRS).]

The corresponding German word sogenannte, and similar words in some
other languages, lack this connotation. Speakers of one of these languages,
who seek a similar construction in English that is `unmarked' (i.e.,
has `no' connotation) might use ``so named'' or ``so called'' in postposition,
but only in restricted situations:

``Some papers were designated as `invited'; the articles so named were
published in volume 1.''

Esteemed female voter. The basic difference between a retro ``stay-at-home
mom'' and a ``soccer mom'' is that the retro
matriarch drives a station wagon, while the modern association-football female parent
drives a superminivan. (Or did.
The Democratic soccer mom now drives a Prius.
Her mom drove a Volvo station wagon.
Republican soccer moms drive domestic pick-ups.)

Oh no! In 2003, a new target group called ``NASCAR
Dads'' was discovered. According to CNN (July 9),
they are white, working-class men inclined to support Republicans but capable
of backing a Democrat if they agree on the issues. Senator Bob Graham of
Florida, then running for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, was
targeting them by sponsoring the ``NASCAR Craftsman Truck'' (an F-150; if you
don't know that that's a Ford pick-up, you probably ain't saved neither).
Small problem: NASCAR fans have very low election participation (never mind
Democratic primaries). No one who reads will be offended if I say ``duh.''
CNN again: ``Bruce Oppenheimer, a Vanderbilt University political science
professor, said Graham will see more of a benefit from the publicity
surrounding his deal than from fans who watched the race live or on
television.'' Either way, he didn't survive the Iowa caucuses.

On NPR earlier in July 2003, I heard a report about
Mexican congressional candidates campaigning among expats (let's not look too
carefully at those documents ¿okey señor?) living in Southern
California. Mexico does not allow absentee voting, and the candidates don't
expect these Mexican citizens to return home to vote. The theory seems to be
that the nonvoters glad-handed in Upper California will button-hole their
relatives back home by phone.

social insect

Everyone's heard of a social butterfly. I used to call myself a social
moth. Just now I found `social wasp' as the translation of caba in a
Portuguese dictionary. Oh, I get it!

Society and Culture

Sign over the Borders magazine rack that holds Playboy and similar
magazines.

sociology

A coin termed by Comte. That's all, probably.

Sock it to me.

In Saturday Review in 1968, it was pointed out (I think by John
Ciardi) that the phrase ``Sock it to 'em'' was used in Steinbeck's The
Grapes of Wrath (1939).

In Steinbeck, the phrase ``sock it to 'em'' was used by the used-car dealer to
mean both ``apply ultimate sales pressure'' and ``screw them.'' In context,
there was no occasion to disambiguate. When Aretha Franklin covered Otis
Redding's ``Respect'' in her hit 1967 album I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved
You,'' the repeated ``sock-it-to-me'' lyrics she added were also unambiguous --
they were understood as a sexual reference.

The reason for the interest in these phrases in 1968 was a then-current TV
humor show that was popularizing the phrase ``Sock it to me.'' The show,
``Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In'' was an unhip, insipid
and wildly popular thing that provided a transition from nothing, or maybe
from some stand-up comedy on Ed Sullivan, to the vastly superior early ``Saturday Night Live.''
In addition to sock-it-to-me, they introduced such putative witticisms as
``You bet your bippy,''
``Here come da judge'' and ``Verrrry interesstink!'' If you grimaced wanly
and listened to the studio laughter, you might convince yourself that you
were enjoying humor. It was a kind of suburban Hee-Haw, minus the
sophistication and fine music. Still, it launched Goldie Hawn (who played
a giggly airhead) and Lily Tomlin (as switchboard tsarina Ernestine). Also,
they got Pres. Dick Nixon to come on and
say

``Sock it to ME?''

It can be proven by calculus that this was a far greater step out of
character for him [ftnt. 5] than any
sax playing on Arsenio could ever be for presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

At the end of the show, co-host Dan Rowan would say to co-host Dick Martin

Say ``Good Night,'' Dick.

and Dick would say

Good Night, Dick.

This was a shameless rip-off of the George Burns and Gracie
Allen Show of radio and early television, which used the sign-off

Say ``good-night'' Gracie. / Good-night, Gracie.

Just to be clear, however, Laugh-In was not a rip-off of Hee-Haw. Hee-Haw
was inspired by Laugh-In. It was also inspired by the Smothers Brothers.
The form that the inspiration took was that Tom and Dick complained to CBS management about the censoring of political
jabs on their show, and CBS ended the piecemeal censorship by cancelling
the show. CBS replaced it with Hee-Haw, a hay-seed copy of Laugh-In with
no memorable contributions to the language, no intelligence, no relevance,
and pun jokes told in black-out format, but more skin.

System Of Cellular Radio for Traffic Efficiency and Safety.
DRIVE project which is developing the
techniques for using digital cellular telephony as the basic
communications medium for transmitting traffic information. See
TSWS.

Socratic answer, One

Socrates in the early dialogues, increasing admixture of Plato in
middle and later writing. See, e.g., John Halverson: ``Plato,
the Athenian Stranger'' Arethusa, 30, pp. 75-102 (1997).

Socratic method, The

The method of disproof. Elenchus. High-brow Lt. Colombo,
avant la Lettre. Is it mere coincidence that Peter Falk is ugly-sexy,
just as Alcibiades describes Socrates in Symposium?

Socratic question, The

When we read Plato writing in Socrates's voice, are we getting Socrates
or Plato? Extensive discussion in

Serve Our Dog Areas. ``...a
non-profit organization formed to provide ongoing support and stewardship
for the Off-Leash dog exercising area at Marymoor Park in Redmond,
Washington.''

soda ash

Sodium carbonate: Na2CO3.

sodium

A deadly poison, lethal even in tiny doses. Found on human fingers in
the form of NaCl (common table salt) solution. The way this poison kills
is by accumulating as ions at the silicon-silicon
oxide interface. These ions cause a
debilitating nonuniformity in the flatband voltage.
The threshold voltage is no longer the same for all devices, nor even
very well defined for any single device. Moreover, the problem increases
with time, because ions originally scattered in the oxide drift in the presence
of the electric field (i.e., when the device is on) and accumulate
at metal-oxide interfaces.

(Although the FET idea was first patented in 1935, it was not until the
late 1960's that IGFET's became commercially
important. Much of the reason is that fab facilities were not initially
clean enough to keep the sodium content low.)

In view of their demonstrated toxicity, contact with humans and other
carbon-based life forms should be avoided. The other alkali metals are bad guys too, but they're
less common.

The popular older name for sodium dodecyl sulphate
(SDS, q.v.), a popular detergent used in
many consumer cleaning products. One interesting effect of SDS on
many people is to make sour things taste bitter. I can't remember the
last time I saw a toothpaste on the market that did not contain SDS.

Special Operations Executive. Organized by the British in 1940 to work
with and encourage resistance movements in Axis-occupied areas. When it was
organized, Winston Churchill expressed the hope that it would help ``set Europe
ablaze,'' but there is broad agreement that the European resistance movements
helped only at the margin. (The SOE also had operations in Asia.)

SOE

State-Owned Enterprise. SOE's in China are evaluated annually by
SASAC.

Solid-Oxide Fuel Cell. A fuel cell (FC)
in which the electrolyte is a solid oxide. Experimental SOFC's operate in a
range of about 800-1000°C and the charge carriers are oxide ions --
O2-. Like FC's with molten-carbonate electrolyte (MCFC), SOFC's can be used to combust carbon monoxide.

Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy. The platform is a Boeing
747-SP aircraft. Somewhat surprisingly to me, this is reported to be the only
airborne astronomical observatory currently in operation.

That claim evidently excludes ordinary planes with people who look out their
windows at the sky. The first noteworthy instance of that occurred in the
1960's, when Gerald Kuiper pointed the business end of a 30 cm telescope out
the window of a plane. Today he could never get it past security, and if he
could they'd charge him for a second seat. And they'd ask him to remove his
``Belt.''

Between 1974 and 1995, NASA operated a telescope from
a military cargo plane.

SOFIA is a joint project of NASA and DLR (the German
analogue). The aircraft operates with a ceiling of 45,000 feet (13,700
meters), above most of the atmosphere and its water vapor. Water vapor absorbs
IR radiation (except in certain ``IR windows''); flying above it makes it
possible to do (full-spectrum) IR astronomy.

SOFM

Self-Organizing Feature Maps. I suppose it'd be sophomoric to try to pun
on this acronym.

S. of S.

Secretary OF State.
This abbreviation occurs in The Wizard
War, a book about British intelligence in
WWII.

soft drink

A carbonated beverage. A soda in the East, a pop in the Midwest, and a
soda pop in the past. ``Carbonated'' here means that it has carbon dioxide
dissolved in the fluid (which is mostly water).

SOG

Spin-On Glass.

SOG

Standard Operating Guidelines. Hey, y'got nuthin' on me. I was just
following orders.

Start Of Heading. ASCII 01 (CTRL-A). (Same character also used for
SOM.)

SOHIO

Standard Oil of OHIO. One of the companies formed from the antitrust
breakup of Standard Oil, based in New Jersey. Before
it consolidated its branding under ``Exxon,'' Standard Oil of New Jersey was
``Esso'' in many places but ``Humble'' in Ohio.

SO/HO, SOHO

Small Office/Home Office.

You used to be able to buy an office-noises-background soundtrack to sound
big when you called. Now you just make a glitzy webpage.

Soho

A district of central London. In the seventeenth century it was an
immigrant area, but you can get an idea of its current status from the lyrics
of ``Werewolves of London.'' The origin of the name is unknown, but
lexicographers with an opinion mostly believe that the name derives from a
former hunting cry.

South Of HeustOn Station. They say that imitation is the sincerest
form of flattery, not appropriatest. This little absurdity is explained
in the next entry.

SoHo

South Of
HOuston Street. A section of NYC.
Although SoHo is pronounced ``So Hoe,'' it is probably useful
to know that the name of Houston Street in NYC is not pronounced
identically with the Texas city named Houston, but instead is pronounced ``house ton.''

There's a story that mispronunciation of that street's name led to the
exposure of a German spy in WWII. I kind of
doubt it. (For another story of enemy Germans thwarted by ignorance of locally
common knowledge, see the SRP entry.)

In April 2006, the Dublin (Ireland) City Council unveiled plans for a 2.6
billion euro cultural and commercial quarter. The quarter was planned as a
rejuvenation of Dublin's historic communities of the Liberties and the Coombe
(mostly the former), located in the south inner city. The project was inspired
by the revitalization of New York City's SoHo, and was to be called ``SoHo''
also, standing in this case for ``South of Heuston Station.'' The most
interesting thing about the whole story, to me, was that in Dublin, somehow
``SoHo'' should be expected to call to mind New York rather than London.

At the time, City manager John Fitzgerald said 2 billion euros of private funds
had already been committed, and that the city council would put forward 100
million euros to fund public-private partnerships that would in turn raise a
further 500 million euros. That sounds rather heavily leveraged.

Maybe I was right about the London/New York thing. In any case, there was
widespread opposition to the name change, and the Dublin City Council
eventually came to its senses. By the time they hired John Thompson and
Partners (JTP) in 2007 or 2008, it was to ``develop a plan for the regeneration
of the Liberties.'' That's fortunate for me, because this is only a SoHo
entry, so I don't have to explain how Ireland was forced to seek an EU bailout
in November 2010, amid the implosion of its heavily leveraged real estate
market. My nameserver can no longer find a server for
<www.theliberties.ie>, and a lot of (most? all?) ambitious construction
plans have been... put on long-term hold.

SOI

Silicon [or Semiconductor] on Insulator. A fabrication technique in which
single-crystalsilicon is deposited on an insulating substrate,
with the obvious advantage of excellent electrical isolation. The insulator is
usually chosen from a small set of materials that are lattice-matched to the
semiconductor one wants to deposit. In fact, for silicon-on-insulator
growth, the only insulators commonly used are sapphire (AKA: SOS) and silicon itself (which has been
implanted with enough oxygen to make it an insulator.

SOI

Southern Oscillation Index. A measure of the intensity of the western
Pacific subtropical high pressure system. Its ``low-frequency'' (period of
36.7 years) oscillations have been adduced to explain long-term fluctuations in
rainfall patterns across China (see QBO entry).

SOIC

Small Outline Integrated Circuit. A miniature
plastic flat pack designed for surface mount with gull-wing leads.
Most versions have lead spacing of 0.05 inches.

Standards Of Learning. Curriculum guides. In Virginia, at least,
teachers consider the SOL's to be a kind of strait-jacket. For English
classes, the SOL's emphasize reading mechanics and grammar, are
accompanied by a panoply of required hand-outs and work-sheet assignments,
and are the subject of annual tests. Literature requirements are also
included but apparently not directly tested, so that aspect is effectively
scanted. The fellow in charge of the SOL's--below the governor--never has
been a teacher himself, and refused to release his own SOL scores to the
public when he took the test himself.

SOL

Suda On-Line. A distributed project
to create an English translation
of the Suda by the coordinated contributions of many translators, editors
and area specialists communicating across the web. `The Suda' is the
generally accepted title-revision of a Byzantine encyclopedia previously
known by the name of its supposed author, `Suidas.' However, there's
been a great deal of debate about all this. All we know really about
Suidas is what we have: his idiosyncratic encyclopedia. See SOLVL for more.

RCA and SOLA share most of their courses, but the RCA curriculum includes some
additional explicitly Catholic curricular items like elementary theology and a
course in Scholastic philosophy.

solar cells

``Solar cells'' are photovoltaic (PV) cells. We're going to use the PV entry for general information about them, and reserve
this entry for information about space applications (viz.,
extraterrestrial uses, on satellites not too far from home).

The principal consideration is light intensity, and as explained at the RTG entry, the main qualitative fact is that solar
cells are the power source of choice from Mars sunward.

Of course, solar cells don't store energy for any longer than a fraction of a
second. (The circuits they are part of may function longer due to capacitance
in parallel with the cell.) For those awkward times when a solar-cell system
is eclipsed (typically by some large body that its satellite is orbiting), it
is necessary to have backup. That's usually batteries.

Satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) make an
interesting case. Because of the tilt of the earth's axis of rotation,
geostationary satellites do not usually go directly behind the earth. That is,
they are not eclipsed by the earth. The exception occurs for a period of a
couple of weeks around each equinox. During this ``eclipse season,'' GEO
satellites are eclipsed daily for up to seventy minutes.

solar-dynamic power system

A power system that is basically a heat engine operating across a
temperature difference created by solar radiation. Sane solar dynamic power
systems include a solar concentrator. Most solar dynamic power systems so
called are intended for space applications, and as such require radiators.
Typical designs rely on closed cycles (i.e., the working fluid is
cycled rather than consumed). The expanding fluids power Brayton turbine or
Stirling cycle engines.

solder

The programming language for real men. Bit flipping is for pansies!

solder sucker

A device for vacuuming up molten solder. Usually has a spring-loaded
piston which, when triggered, retracts rapidly from a cylinder to leave
behind an evacuated volume. I guess I should be embarrassed to admit
that I have found these to be a lot of fun.

A card game one person can play against himself or herself, but not
both.

It's not a good idea to play solitaire for hours on end. Take a
break, eat a salty snack.

sol palmetto

What is this, charades? You heard about saw palmetto. (And you probably heard
about it from Larry Kimb.)

sols

Obsolete (I should write obolsete) English word for the obsolete
French coin called a sou. You still remember
the sou, right? Right? It's the source of the common everyday
expressions ``I don't care a sou'' and ``I don't give a sou.''
Like the equally popular expression, ``I don't care a farthing,'' it expresses
lack of interest. It's amazing how long these expressions persist in common
speech, isn't it? I guess that once they become common coin, well, Bob's your
uncle!

The odd thing that strikes one immediately is that while the farthing (when
still in circulation) was the smallest (or smallest common) denomination in
England, the sou when in circulation was worth 12 deniers.

solutions

Y'know, one man's problem is another man's solution. For example, I used a
google search solution and discovered that
my problem was nVIDIA, which advertises itself as
a source of ``solutions for'' Macintosh. I'm sure Apple would prefer to think of the Mac as a
solution rather than a problem.

Interestingly, the Spanish-language version
of the nVIDIA homepage, alone among the eight non-English versions, leaves
``solutions for'' in the original English. For another Spanish language issue, see the nVIDIA entry. You
want to know about software? Screw that! We talk about human languages
here.

As you may gather, I consider the use of ``solution'' in the sense of
``marketed service or product'' to be an ugly bit of businesspeak. To give the
language criminals their due extenuation, however, I'll observe that in
``Watching the Wheels,'' John Lennon sang

Well I tell them there's no problem, only solutions
Well they shake their heads and they look at me as if I've lost my mind

Maybe not so extenuating after all.

solvent

An adjective often used by economists to indicate liquidity; a noun
often used by chemists to indicate liquid.

SOLVL

Suda On-Line Volunteer List. Part of the scattered collection of
web-based bits and pieces of initial enthusiasm that have since been
integrated into SOL.

SOM

Start Of Message. ASCII 01 (CTRL-A). (Same character also used for
SOH.)

SOMA

Symposium On Mediterranean Archaeology. The next one, to be held at
the University of Sheffield, is SOMA
2000.

SOME

So Others Might Eat. Self-described as
``an interfaith, community-based organization that exists to help the poor and
homeless of our nation's capital. We meet the immediate daily needs of the
people we serve with food, clothing, and health care. We help break the cycle
of homelessness by offering services, such as affordable housing, job training,
addiction treatment, and counseling, to the poor, the elderly and individuals
with mental illness.'' They should work on this statement SOME more and find a
way to foreground the potential ``serve ... food'' pun, rearranging it into a
possibly non-zeugmatic
syllepsis (serve people ... [serve] food).

Devising an organization name whose acronym is a modest quantifier was very
clever. (``Please, sir, I want SOME more.'') But they should have stayed away
from the subjunctive ``might.'' It's too tentative. If they're hungry, then
it's enough that they may eat, and they will. I mean, which universe are they
speculating about? Or was this the preterite indicative of may? That's
so yesterday. (Actually, most of the ordinary modals are fossil preterites.
That's why they never take a final ess in the
third-person singular.)

someofthesame

Nevertheless and inasmuch as words, notwithstanding ... why not some of the
same?

some say

Someone could conceivably say -- for the speaker's convenience, assume
that someone does say. After all, it takes all kinds.

Okay, okay, it would be strange, but not inconceivable, right?
Say it, dammit!

something

No, not that.

sometimes

The most important concept in airline reservations science.

Fares are lower Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday, sometimes.

Fares are lower if you stay over a Saturday night, sometimes.

Fares are lower if you book one, two, or three weeks in advance,
sometimes.

With lower-priced fares there's a penalty for making any change,
sometimes.

In the preceding statements, you can usually replace sometimes with
usually, sometimes.

My travel agent said, ``remember that, and you'll go far.'' I laughed. A few
hours later, as I was writing this entry, I finally got it. A little
travel-agent humor.

A consonant that is not an obstruent. That is, a voiced consonant that is
produced without constricting the vocal tract so far as to produce a stop or
friction (as in a fricative) or both (an affricate). The nasals encountered in
European languages are all sonorants, as are the liquids (r and l) of English.
Some approximants, like /w/, are also sonorants.
There's a certain amount of play in the definition of sonorants, and I've even
seen the meaning extended to include vowels.

SOP, SoP

School Of Philosophy. This has a nice ambiguity, and it reminds everyone
that the word for school is derived from a Greek word meaning `leisure.' There
don't seem to be any academic institutions that favor this abbreviation. I
can't imagine why. Some universities' registration
systems do inflict ``SOP'' as a course code prefix.

At the University of Sydney (in NSW), there's a
School of Philosophy, Gender, History, and
Ancient World Studies. It's interesting to philosophize on the question, which
of the words following of were meant to modify ``World Studies'' -- if
there was any meaning at all. You wonder, if they decided to concentrate on
their core business and spin off some earlier diversification, what would be
left and how it would be branded. According to a June 2001 newsletter of the
ASCS, ``mail sent to this School's name disappears
into a black hole.''

When I was in grad school, I met a woman named Sydney, or maybe even Sidney. I
pointed out that she had an unusual name for a girl. She pointed out that she
still resented her parents' having given it to her. You know, she was
beautiful, and a rose by any other does smell as sweet (though I can't say
roses are very fragrant). Incidentally, it wasn't until the nineteenth century
that flower names began to be popular as girls' given names in English. (Rose
is the single prominent exception, having come into use centuries earlier.)
Annette Bening costarred as Sydney Ellen Wade in a 1995 romantic comedy ``The American President,'' in
which one of the minor humorous themes concerned the President's attempts to
buy her flowers without his job getting in the way.

Sum Of Products. Typically in the sense of set theory or Boolean logic:
a union of intersections or the logical or (sum) of a number of
and'ed factors.

Every logic function can be expressed in SOP form, just as every logic
function can be expressed in POS form. If a certain
term appears in many of the products, then it can be more efficient for
evaluation to factor out the common term.

SOPHomore. A student in the second year of a four-year sequence, or a
``scholar-athlete'' in the second year of college eligibility. (Either a
``true sophomore'' or a third-year student who was red-shirted as a freshman or
for some other reason has used up only one year of eligibility at the start of
the season.) Also abbreviated So.

SOPHA

Société de philosophie
analytique. This is the kind of acronym that makes you pull
yourself by the forelock and ask ``Why? Why!!?? Why couldn't they include
just one more letter from the word philosophie and have a word
that means knowledge instead of a homonym for a piece of furniture?''
Cf.Mensa.

Quoting from an email, SOPHA ``was created in 1993 with the project of
improving and expanding the practice of analytical philosophy in French. One
of its mandates, the organization of a triennial conference, aims at
facilitating philosophical contacts and networking among French-speakers and
Francophile, all over the world.'' French analytical philosophers are probably
thinner on the ground than American continental philosophers (not counting
literature departments).

The third conference, ``Language, Thought, Action,'' was held in Montreal in
September 2005. The proceedings were published in Philosophia Scientiae and
are available
online.

Techniques that may require a mastery of arithmetic. The head term is used
by political analysts and their ilk to puff up their and their friends' work.
The implementation of the techniques is done by anonymous writers of
statistical software packages. The job of the political analysts is to take
the output from the statistical programs and systematically misunderstand it.

A group that's interested in oral reading might have come up with an acronym
that was more pronounceable than this initialism, and a group that offers a
three-day workshop for $400 (includes shared overnight accommodations, full
board, instruction and materials) ought to be able to figure out how to afford
its own website. If the link above fourohfours, try
this search.

The SOS distress call has caught the imagination of many musicians. The song
``I'll Send an SOS to the World'' contains many triple three-note patterns.

In 1965 or 66, the singer-songwriter Edwin Starr
was watching the television show ``Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea'' and
became intrigued by the distress signal. He worked it into a song which was
originally called ``Sending Out Soul.'' ``I changed it into a love song by
calling it `Stop Her on Sight','' said Starr. ``I know that should have been
`S.H.O.S.,' but the record company said no one would notice.''

In her The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1933),
Gertrude Stein wrote this about the
arrival of the doughboys in '17 (p. 224):

... At any rate the american soldiers came [to Nîmes], a regiment of them
of the S.O.S. the service of supply, how well I remember how they used to say
it with the emphasis on the of.
We soon got to know them all well and some of them very well.
There was Duncan, a southern boy with such a very marked southern accent that
when he was well into a story I was lost. Gertrude Stein whose people all come
from Baltimore had no difficulty and they used
to shout with laughter together, and all I could understand was that they had
killed him as if he was a chicken. The people in Nîmes were as much
troubled as I was. ...

More of Gertrude Stein's views about American soldiers telling stories can be
found at the have-got-to entry.

Sociology Of Science. Sounds like a distress
call. In an article in 1974, Stephen Brush asked ``Should the History of
Science be Rated X?'' [It was the title of the article, which appeared in
Science, vol. 183 (22 March 1974), pp. 1164-1172.] Brush, an
accomplished historian of science, usually addressed more difficult questions.
As recently as the 2005 AAAS meeting, he participated in a panel discussion
that took his landmark 1974 paper as a starting point. (This is just the
anyone-can-join AAAS.)

SOS

Strength Of Schedule. How good the teams are, that a team plays over the
course of a season.

Scholarship Of Teaching and Learning. Looking for a definition? Any
definition?
Here's one:

At Illinois State, we have defined SoTL as "systematic reflection on
teaching and learning made public." This definition arose from the work
of a diverse group of faculty, staff, and students involved in the early
Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) Campus
Program in 1998. Currently, our primary efforts to support SoTL on campus our
[sic] housed with the Cross Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning.

It's not quite horrifying to think that many of the people involved in defining
scholarship as systematic reflection made public think they're engaged in
anything but a travesty.

SOTM

Satellite communications On-The-Move.

SotRT

The Society Of The Rusting TARDIS.
``An informal gathering of
people who enjoy British television,'' may the Lord have mercy on their souls.

SOTU

State Of The Union. Article II, Section 3, of the US Constitution
stipulates that the President

shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the
Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge
necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both
Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with
Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he
shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he
shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all
the Officers of the United States.

sou

An old French coin of low denomination. Its name survives in common
expressions like ``not worth a sou.'' Okay, maybe that's not such a
common expression anymore. Don't take any wooden nickels, my friend.

sound bite

A segment of political speech of any length that constitutes ``news''
without conveying information:

Eugene A. Nida, in his Toward a Science of Translating, suggested
the term ``meaningful mouthful'' for the unit in terms of which one
should think of translating. For another glossary entry inspired by Nida's
work, see old flame retardant.

Not an abbreviation for the Soviet
Union. The Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion is one of the better known
and more important archaeological sites in Greece.

sourcing

We're talking suppliers here. It's a good idea to design with an
eye to multiple suppliers. Particularly if you use a highly specialized
or low-volume part, or if you do not have a long-term contract with your
supplier, or if your principal supplier is located in an earthquake-prone
area like Japan or California. Design strategies
include layouts that can accommodate multiple package dimensions and
styles, and designing around high-volume elements.

Souteast Asia

The spelling of Southeast Asia on the binding of Historical
Dictionary of Southeast Asia by John N. Miksic
(Scarecrow Press, 2007). That's on
the first edition. I imagine future editions will have a more orthodox
spelling. The reference librarian thought it was funny too. ``Maybe we should
send it back.''

South Ken

SOUTH KENsington.

SOV

Single-Occupancy Vehicle. A vehicle occupied by a single person, who is
assumed to be the driver. For official purposes, motorcycles are excluded
from the category of SOV's. (If they weren't, they'd probably be the only
common sort of SOV's that are also HOV's.) I'm not
sure about empty buses.

SOV

Subject Object Verb. One possible order of major elements in a sentence.

soviet

Russian noun meaning `council.'

soviet

English adjective characterizing political arrangements of the Soviet
Union (put in place starting in 1917 by revolutionary socialists in what had
been called the Russian Empire, and elsewhere as opportunities presented).
Also describes similar bureaucratic arrangements inspired by the Russian
experiment.

Soviet

English adjective describing avowedly communist governments patterned on
the USSR.

sow

Female pig.

To make a silk purse out of a sow's ear is the unrealized dream of modern
alchemists. Transmutation (of base metals into gold) has already been achieved by neutron
irradiation.

SOW

Statement Of Work. General commercial and government usage.

SOWER

Southern Ocean Whale and Ecosystem Research. (Don't think of
sewer.) A program of the International Whaling Commission
(IWC).

Soweto

SOuthWEstern TOwnships. Eleven miles southwest of Johannesburg, the
largest city in South Africa. Soweto was founded in
the 1930's as a legal residence for black gold miners. (Miners, not panners:
there's a gold vein under Johannesburg.) Initially, rapid growth was fueled by
an influx of job seekers. In 1948, however, the white supremacist National
Party came to power and imposed a severe apartheid. Growth from the 50's on
was thus also fed by the progressive expulsion of blacks from Johannesburg.
Thus, though Soweto was generally poor and working-class, it eventually had all
social classes present.

This mix is reminiscent of the situation in US, where black ghettoes
like Harlem were home to all social classes. In the US, the
situation changed when housing nondiscrimination laws of the 60's
gave those better off a chance to move out. This departure has been
identified by James Q. Wilson (I think), and others, as a cause of
social collapse in the inner city. In the ninties, there has begun
to be a return of the black middle class to traditionally black
neighborhoods, attracted in part by lower costs of home ownership.
That's what the newspaper said, anyway.

The 1955 Freedom Charter, a list of civil rights demands, was ratified
by ANC delegates meeting in the Kliptown
section of Soweto.

Soweto is famous principally for protests that began in 1976. By exile,
incarceration and murder, the NP regime had succeeded in suppressing
black resistance to apartheid. In 1976, the government ordered all
public schools to teach science and math in Afrikaans, leading to a
student protest on June 16, 1976. Police responded with bullets, and over 80 students died.
This massacre rekindled rebellion, with rent strikes and other protest
continuing until the end of apartheid in 1994.

SOWG

Son Of WinGreek. WinGreek is one of the systems for inserting polytonic
Greek in text normally set up for a modern
language. SOWG is reportedly an improvement.

sowieso

German: `anyway, anyhow, in any case.'

Some words are unaccountably cool, or have coolness that one cannot completely
account for. In principle, it might be the sound of the word. For example,
when I started to learn English at age 5, ``garbage can'' was my favorite vocabulary -- it
was full of strange new sounds for a Spanish-speaking boy. It might be the
oddly-shaped semantic hole it fills. (I can't think of a good example
off-hand. Come back later.) Or it might be something else. In general, it
probably has something to do with the poetry of the word, because poetry is
what is lost in translation.

Anyway, sowieso is one of those words. It's hard to explain why, when
you can use it, you want to. Perhaps it has to do with the positioning of
adverbs in German sentences. Unlike anyway, the adverb sowieso
rarely comes at the beginning of a sentence. (It does occur colloquially as an
interjection, but then it's a one-word sentence meaning `of course.') It may
have to do with the construction of the word: so in German has a meaning
similar to so in English (as well as so in Japanese); wie
means (and is cognate with) English how. Both of these function
familiarly both as words and in compounds. For example, soundso is
basically `so-and-so.' Likewise with wie: As a
prefix, irgend- can typically be translated as `some-,' and sure enough
irgendwie means `somehow.' This is probably the place to mention that
there was a German coming-of-age movie entitled ``Irgenwie und Sowieso.'')

Sowjetunion

`Soviet Union' in German.

SOWPODS

According to
the NSA, `` `SOWPODS' represents a
combination of the Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary
(OSPD) [standard in North America] and the
Official SCRABBLE® Words
(OSW), the former British word source.''
Appropriately, then, the seven initial letters are rearranged to create the
word SOWPODS.

SOWPODS was created in 1991 for the World Scrabble Championships in London and
subsequent World Championships. It has slowly been adopted in ``most of the
world.'' That is, in most of the places where there is a designated official
dictionary. As of 2005, that includes most of the British Commonwealth, with
the significant exception of Canada, and a few mostly Arab countries. Since
January 2003, all British tournaments have officially used the
OSW-I, or Official
SCRABBLE® Words, International, which is now equivalent to
SOWPODS, although at least some UK clubs use OSPD. As
of 2005, North America (i.e., the US and Canada) is the only major
region not to adopt SOWPODS for tournament play, unless Israel or Thailand is a
major region. (Hmmm... the winner of the 2003
WSC was from Thailand.)

SOWPODS has about 25,000 more words than the OSPD. So far, referenda of NSA
members have rejected switching, and tournament play in the US is according to
TWL. Since SOWPODS and the WSC were created in
1991, all eight champions have been nationals of countries that used something
other than SOWPODS.

Scrabulous serves a look-up tool for
the current SOWPODS and
TWL. (Similar tools are served
on a decaying page
with forwarding links to <Scrabulous.com>, but until Scrabulous.com
finally offered definitions, it was handy to keep the link. Now it's just here
for hisorical reasons. The old page is at
<Bingobinge.com>. When you use all seven of your tiles in a single turn
in Scrabble, you are said to score or make a bingo. I don't know who says
this. Maybe you could say it yourself. You could also say ``hot dang!'' I
don't know if either of these is officially approved terminology anywhere, but
a bingo is worth an extra fifty points.)
Bob Jackman
serves a number of SOWPODS word lists.

Founded in 1974 by the American Academy of Religion (AAR and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).

A distinct organization, the Scholars
Press Consortium, was founded by the AAR, SBL, American Philological
Association (APA), and American
Society of Papyrologists (ASP) to provide
publishing, membership, accounting and information services to the founding
associations and about seventeen additional scholarly organizations in the
academic fields of religion, biblical studies and classical antiquity.

Both organizations were abruptly dissolved at the end of 1999.

SP

Signal Processor.

SP

Simulated Patient. You can do this without taking off your shoes, which is
more than I can say about plane travel. The only clarification we offer right
now is at the NAMC entry.

SP

Small Polaron. A polaron is an electron or hole together with the
deformation it produces in the medium it is in. A polaron is ``small'' if the
deformation is substantial only in the near vicinity of the electron. In
principle, one can make this more precise.

Sp.

Spanish, Spain (ES), etc. For information about the language, visit
the Spanish entry.

sp.

Species (singular). The plural of species is species, so if
you want to be clear that you mean the singular, you're better off using the
abbreviation. (The abbreviation of the plural word is spp.)

Species is taxonomists' Latin for `species.'
In fact, it's anybody's Latin for species. Beyond that, things get
complicated. The word species was a fifth-declension noun. If that is completely, but I mean completely,
meaningless to you, then you should probably go back to the
A.M. entry for a little orientation.

Back? Good. Fifth-declension nouns, like res, dies, and
species, have identical singular and plural forms in the nominative
case. (You probably thought that the point of declensions was to communicate
information such as grammatical number and case (the word's function in a
phrase). That is incorrect; the purpose of declensions is to be cool.) You
think identical singular and plural forms are strange? There are languages,
like Chinese and Japanese, that don't even distinguish grammatical number.
Different languages tend to give different kinds of information by default.
German, like Latin, usually allows you to distinguish singular from plural, but
some nouns have the same form, and the number information is in the article.
For example, der Koffer is `the suitcase' and die Koffer is `the
suitcases' (both in the nominative).

To be fair, for some uncountable nouns one rarely needs a plural form, and
res (`thing') and species (`form, appearance') lean toward the
uncountable. (This argument doesn't work so well with dies, which means
day. Just for good measure, in the singular dies was sometimes
construed feminine rather than its usual masculine. The devil is in the
details. The devil revels in the details.) I should at least mention duals.
There.

In English, we tend to use the nominative forms of Latin nouns. Since we don't
decline nouns by case, we just throw the other forms away. There's a big pile
of them accumulating in a county in northern Nevada, where the US government is
trying to convince the three people who live there to allow the waste to be
buried at a depth of 10,000 stadia. They object: ``what's a stadia?''

Actually, we sometimes save the odd declined form for a phrase. Also, the
genitive forms have been found useful for scientific experrrrrrrimentation!
Or for science, anyway -- particularly astronomy and biological taxonomy.
Fifth-declension nouns normally have genitive singulars ending in -ei, like
rei. As you've probably figured out by now, the sentence adverb
normally is a red flag of danger. Sure enough, -iei (I wanna say -iei
ee! oh!; there, I said it) was too much even for the stoic Romans, and
specie and specii were used as genitive forms of species.
(Similar stuff happened with dies, and also acies, facies,
and pernicies. Eventually things got so confusing that in Rome people
switched to Italian.)

You might say that species has a defective declension, and you might be
right, but not for that reason. A word is said to be defective when it is
missing some of its inflected forms. According to Lewis
and Short, in the time of Cicero the genitive and dative plurals of
species were not in use, and formarum and formis took
their respective places. How do they know? Maybe they just meantformarum instead of specierum! Okay, that's enough, let's do a
different entry.

Sp.

Latin, Spurius. A praenomen, typically abbreviated when writing
the full tria nomina. Also ``S,'' which it gets instead of Servius (Ser.) or Sextus (Sex.).

Spurius means `illegitimate'; its 0.7% frequency in CIL vol. I (see the tria nomina entry) likely underestimates
the actual frequency of bastards in the subject population, however that was
defined, if only because two children of one woman would probably not get the
same name.

Studies in Philology. A journal of general (not just classical)
philology.

SP

Suppressive Person. A term used seriously by the Church of Scientology and
facetiously by its critics
to refer to critics of the Church of Scientology. There are also SP rankings
from SP1 to SP9, many having to do with the extent of barratry the Co$ has deployed against the person.

Texas no longer leads the nation in Fortune 500 companies headquartered there.
In fact, the state comes in third, with 51 major companies headquartered in
Texas compared with 57 last year. Some of that is the result of mergers, like
Fort Worth-based Burlington Northern Santa Fe being acquired by Nebraska-based
Berkshire Hathaway spacer, and Houston-based Continental Airlines
spacer merging with Illinois-based United.

Emphasis added (for, um, emphasis). Those look to me like strange
places to place ``spacer'' -- or spacer either. Cf.KOMING.

spacetime

I like to read the horoscope column every so often. Not the whole column,
of course. Just Aries. I usually read Aries because that's the first sign
listed. Then I go back to the crossword puzzle. I never read the horoscope on
Mondays because the puzzle is too easy. (For those desperate to do the
crossword in a reputable newspaper on Monday, the usual approach is to cut out
the across clues and solve using only the downs.)

Some years ago I met an interesting single woman on the internet who seemed
nice, and we progressed to a phone conversation. We decided to get together,
but she wanted to know my birthdate and where I was born. She needed these
inputs for her astrology software. She was becoming more interesting than I
had bargained for. And the program was acting balky. Maybe the fault, dear
Brutus, is not in our stars, but PIFOK. Maybe she
was misspelling ``Buenos Aires.'' Anyway, the problem seemed to get ironed
out, and we set a, ahem, date.

I guess it was fated that one of us would call and call it off. She beat me to
it. I guess she got the program working.

SPACH

Society
for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage. In late February
and early March of 2001, the Taliban greatly simplified the task of SPACH by
destroying much of what had survived the previous two or three decades of war.
(In Pashto, you should know, taliban means `seekers of knowledge' or, in
the context that led to the internationally known group, `students.')
Preserving what is left of Afghanistan's cultural
heritage is much more manageable, now that there's so much less of it.

SPAD, spad

Signal[s] Passed at Danger. A category of
railway accident or incident. Unlike most
such specialist terminology (e.g., CFIT),
the word has entered common use in Britain. It has also been verbed, with `to
spad' meaning `to pass a signal at danger.'

Another technical acronym that has (less surprisingly) entered common usage in
Britain and been verbed is TUPE.

SPAD, S.P.A.D., Spad

The acronym that was eventually used to represent a company originally
founded in 1911 as Aéroplanes Deperdussin, after its CEO Armand
Deperdussin. Perhaps more formally it was known as Société
des Aéroplanes Deperdussin, `Deperdussin Airplane
Company.' The company first used the initialism S.P.A.D. in 1912, but only
administratively -- apparently as an abbreviation of its (new?) legal name.
The planes and the company continued to be known popularly by the name of
Deperdussin. Its first commercially successful model, the Deperdussin TT, was
manufactured for the English and Russian markets by the British Deperdussin
Company and the Lebedev company, resp.

The company had a brilliant start, introducing a number of innovations (see,
for example, the Dep control entry). In early
August 1913, however, Armand Deperdussin was arrested for fraud, and the
company was soon put into receivership. Deperdussin was never again involved
with aviation in any significant way. More information about him (but not much
yet) can be found at or linked from the
Deperdussin entry.

In August 1914, as France went to war
(WWI), a consortium led by the famous aviator Louis
Blériot purchased the company assets. The operation of the company was
put in the hands of Louis Béchereau, the engineer responsible for the
company's plane designs under Deperdussin. Given the scandal of l'affaire
Deperdussin, a new
name was deemed advisable. Alfred Leblanc, Blériot's right-hand man and
a successful plane racer himself, suggested that the company retain the four
letters S-P-A-D, at least partly to be justified by the fact that in
Volapük, the word means `speed.' An acronym expansion was also adopted,
however: Société pour l'Aviation et ses
Dérivés. (I've seen both pour and Pour
versions; I'm agnostic on the issue.)

A word about Volapük. This was an artificial international language
created by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest of Baden, Germany.
In the 1880's it was immensely successful by the standards of such projects,
with at least a couple of hundred clubs, a couple of dozen periodicals, etc.
It was overtaken at the end of the nineteenth century by easier languages like
Esperanto. Especially Esperanto. (On the other hand, my father taught
Esperanto in his youth, yet though I don't own any books in Esperanto, I do
own a mathematics book in Latino Sine Flexione, written by the mathematician
Peano, who invented the language. At first I thought it was some odd dialect
of Italian. It reminds me of Enrico Fermi's experience as a boy, reading a
wonderful mechanics book that had been written in the nineteenth century by a
Jesuit priest. As he worked his way through it, he would regale his older
sister with his discoveries. She did not wish to be so regaled; she was
interested in the so-called humanities, and not in science. When he finished
the book, he remarked to his sister: ``you know, it's written in
Latin. I hadn't noticed.'' This is from memory. I
read the story in an early chapter of
Atoms in the Family;
that's in English, so you won't find it verbatim there either.) Anyway,
the root vocabulary of Volapük is taken largely from English, though the
roots are almost randomly deformed, apparently with the intention of giving no
one an unfair advantage in learning the language. So the word spad is
very probably derived from the English word speed.

One thing I did not give above is the original expansion of S.P.A.D. in 1912.
I'm not sure what it is. There are a number of contenders, which I list here
with the number of ghits on French pages as of
Groundhog Day, 2009:

Société pour les Appareils Deperdussin

(45)

Société de Production des Aéroplanes
Deperdussin

(9)

Société de Production des Avions Deperdussin

(6)

Société Provisoire des Aéroplanes
Deperdussin

(5)

Société pour les Avions Deperdussin

(5)

The version with the greatest number of French
ghits has the following further thing to be said
for it that is not immediately obvious: the company was also producing motor
boats at the time, and while appareils is understood as `airplanes' in
the appropriate context, in general it means something more general, like
`machine' or `device,' and such ambiguity may have been attractive and
preferable to something like `Deperdussin Airplanes.'

The version with provisoire has in its favor the fact that it's not very
plausible French. That is, it's not an expansion a French-speaker would be
likely to come up with accidentally, merely by misremembering a more correct
form (as the avions forms might be), so maybe it is the correct form.
The provisoire form is the one given by Jay P. Spenser in The
Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings, (Smithsonian, Nov. 2008).

More detail regarding the oddity of ``provisoire'': one is tempted to translate
Société Provisoire des Aéroplanes Deperdussin as
`Deperdussin Airplane Supply [or Manufacturing] Company.' On its face it
doesn't make much sense in French, as provisoire has the sense of
`provisional, temporary,' and the TLFi gives no
indication that it was ever used in the requisite sense. (Likewise Le Grand
Robert.) The word is cognate, of course, with English words like
provide, provident, and provision. The French word
provision has principal senses similar to the English: supply, stock.
If provisoire was used in the sense of `that provides,' then it would be
something like the use of provident in the same sense in English:
strange, but not impossible.

The Spad S 13 came from a firm with a long tradition: S.P.A.D.
(Société pour l'Aviation et ses Dérivés).
This factory, owned by Armand Deperdussin [actually, there were a number of
factories, and a société could not consist of a single
investor], held all the absolute speed records in 1912 and 1913. The aircraft,
produced between 1914 and 1916, after the take-over of the business by Louis
Blériot, were not exceptionally successful. But in the summer of 1916
the picture changed completely, and the Spad S 13 rapidly became one
of the Allies' outstanding aircraft. What it lacked in maneuverability it more
than made up for in speed. Its maximum of 142 m.p.h. was produced by a
220 h.p. Hispano-Suiza engine. Eddie Rickenbacker, whose 26 victories made him
America's most successful pilot in World War I, was one of the best known
S 13 aces.

The illustration (pp. 46-47) shows a single-seater biplane with green and brown
camo; the rudder has a scalloped trailing edge and various bits of information
superimposed on what I would regard as a French tricolor. There's a curious
symbol on the middle of the fuselage that looks like Uncle Sam's hat flying
through a vertical hoop.

According to the stats accompanying the illustration, in 1917 its engine was
a Hispano-Suiza 8BA V-8, and in 1918 a Hispano-Suiza 8BEc V-8. The second
engine apparently produced 235 h.p.

(The book was illustrated by Carlo Demand. The text of the German original was
by Heiner Emde; the translator is not identified, but he is criticized in a
copyright-page erratum: ``The use of `Kaiser' instead of `Emperor' in the title
of the section beginning on page 164 is an error of the German translator which
the American publishers unaccountably overlooked and for which they
apologize.'' It seems that some error was made, but without the original it's
not clear what mistake was made by whom. The section in question bears the
title ``The Kaiser's new bird of prey: Japan's most famous hunter of World War
II.'' The last Kaiserso-called
abdicated after Germany's defeat in WWI, and the Third Reich had no ``Kaiser''
or quite equivalent title. FWIW, Führer means `leader.')

In 1903, of course, the US was the world leader in aviation. And the US still
had the greatest number of pilots in 1908, when Deperdussin first became
interested in aviation. Around 1910, the Wrights apparently felt they had a
good enough product and turned more of their attention to other things,
including marketing their planes, certifying pilots, and defending their
patents. Other countries started catching up in participation and technology.
By 1911, when Aéroplanes Deperdussin was founded, France had more
pilots than any country in the world. This was accompanied by a parallel surge
to world leadership in aviation technology. What happened afterwards? Here's
the answer of William Winter, on page 208 of his War Planes of all
Nations (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1943). The book is divided
into eight national sections -- US, UK, Russia, France, Holland, Germany,
Italy, and Japan -- and this introduces the French section:

The story of modern French aviation is the tragic story of France herself. The
pity of it all is that the French were capable of putting on a much better
``show'' than they did. French designers and fliers have always ranked at the
top; their ideas often were brilliant and had tangible effects on the course of
aviation. French Spads and Nieuports performed a mighty part in the aerial
fighting of World War I.

And even in this war the French did not lack ideas. Many fine
prototypes were on hand and ready for production. The people who guided her
aviation industry felt the approaching storm long before it struck, but their
hands were tied so that the best airplanes were never produced in quantity.
Politics and labor troubles hamstrung the French air force, just as they did
her entire war effort. Indeed, the labor situation was so bad before the war
that the government took control of virtually the entire manufacturing setup.
Under Pierre Cot the French plane builders were grouped geographically into
what was called the nationalized industry. Unfortunately, results were worse
than ever, if such a thing were possible. During the so-called
Sitzkrieg her airplane production was only a trickle, a trickle that
evaporated in some months.

At the Paris Salon air show in 1938 a line-up of impressive French
fighting planes was revealed. Bombers such as her Leo 45 were exquisite
aerodynamically. But of perhaps a dozen worth-while new types, only a few got
into the manufacturing stage before that fateful June in 1940. France was a
pioneer of the low-wing fighter monoplanes. Her then strange bimotored
fighter-bombers anticipated a trend that all nations are following today. The
Potez 63 and Breguet 690 are examples. Indeed, the French always claimed that
the Germans got their inspiration for the Messerschmitt Me-110 from the agile
twin-engined Potez 63. Of course, the French machines mentioned would not be
in the same league with the Douglas Boston, but they were first. And speaking
of the Boston, it is a fact that the French ordered that machine before the
British did. When France fell the British took over her contracts. France
always was a keen student of design. Her Mercier low-drag cowlings and the
flexibly mounted cannon on her prewar bombers were other noteworthy examples.
Hispano-Suiza ``moteur'' hub-firing cannon for fighters were commonplace in
France at least twelve years ago.

spade-mashie

Old name for golf club that was something like a modern six iron, or one
number higher than a mashie.

spaldeen

I encountered this word in ``Rooting for the Indians--A Memoir'' of Hillel
Halkin that appeared in Commentary,
October 2007.

My cousin Jonathan, who lived a few blocks away, was a Yankees
fan, adding to the rivalry with which we played slug and Chinese with a
spaldeen on the sidewalk. (You won't find it in any dictionary, but there
wasn't a New York boy in those years who could not
have told you that a spaldeen, made by the same Spalding Company that
manufactured baseballs, was the pink core of a tennis ball and the regulation
playing ball of the city's streets.)

Halkin apparently didn't check at
OneLook, where (at least until this entry
is indexed) three dictionaries, including the 1997 Random House Unabridged,
offer two or three definitions.

v. To spam the net is to send email or
post USENET news broadly to inappropriate
destinations. Extra points for profligate use of exclamation signs and
alphabetic-order selection of destination newsgroups. Cf.spam trap.

Has been creatively assigned an acronym expansion: Stupid People's
AdvertiseMent.

According to the great fillosofer Discardes --

Cookito, ergo spam.

For US$700 you can buy a CD-ROM with over eight million data records including
``contact name or title, company name where applicable, address, telephone
number and fax number when available, .com, .net or .org URL, and email
address.'' Finding and emailing you is cheaper than dirt, yet filthier.
(Prices for such email collections have come down susbtantially since I first
wrote this entry with the $700 figure.)

Now, I am sure that the scholars of this marketing genre --
spamaesthesiologists, or whatever they're called -- have found a number of
distinctive features of spam to study, but one that intrigues me is a kind of
statistical personalization. To be clear: if the radio talent says ``good luck!'' I may reasonably suspect that this
wish is not intentionally directed to me personally. In other words, I know
that it's meaningless. If the same expression is conveyed in email, I may not
realize that others have received the same message, and so I might consider the
possibility that it wasn't meaningless. Taking this one step further, a
spammer may send a highly personalized message to millions of victims (what are
we -- spamees? electronic toast?). Most who receive this message will realize
it is spam, but some of the tiny fraction for whom it is spot-on may be drawn
in. These thoughts were prompted by a spam message yesterday that asserted
incorrectly (and with an Italian accent) --

``We know you^Ňre an hair fashion operator.''

There are endless other versions of this, of course. Sometimes it happens
inadvertently. Etexts of fine literature are being mined or sampled for
camouflage to defeat spam detectors. On the classics list there are threads
from time to time asking whether a current high frequency of references to
classical antiquity demonstrates highly accurate spam targeting. (Apparently
it doesn't.)

A related trick is the fractionated stock prediction. In the simplest version,
the artist sends out a free newsletter in different versions, making different
predictions, to very large numbers of virgin recipients. To those that
received versions of the first newsletter with good predictions, a second round
of newsletters is sent out, similarly variable. Some of the second-round
recipients will thus receive two accurate newsletters. By iteration, and with
no great knowledge of the market, the artist can winnow an exponentially small
target audience of newsletter subscribers who have reason to be impressed by
the consistent accuracy of the newsletter. This trust can then be manipulated
to the artist's profit. That's the theory anyway, and computerized deception management would seem to make it
feasible, but I don't know if this has really been tried.

Spam

Trademark created by contraction from
Hormel's original name for the product -- ``Spiced Ham'' --
which was copied by other meatpackers.

n. A pressed pink pork product marketed by Hormel since 1937. It was
distributed as a food supplement in the US during the Great Depression, and to
British civilians during WWII. The long-time butt
(sorry about that) of jokes, subject of a skit and song on the Monty Python TV
series, and inspiration of Haiku (see our entry for homogeneous) and pink spirituality. We have a rather dated page of Spam Religion
sites, and Yahoo has indexed a
few items, but probably not as many as
Josh Warnick.

Hormel reports that Spam is consumed at the rate of 3.8 cans per minute, and
they should know, but they couldn't know what fraction of that goes into the
kitchen bit bucket.

I just got around to reading SubStance #82, 1997 (i.e., vol.
XXVI, no. 1, 1997). SubStance is subtitled A Review of Theory and
Literary Criticism and is extremely boring. I don't know why I punish
myself, but let's get it over with. This special issue, guest editor
Renée Riese Hubert, was on ``Metamorphoses of the Book.'' Paul
Zelevansky has an article entitled ``Attention SPAM®'' (pp. 135-159).
He asserts (p. 156) that the ``ingredients of SPAM® are pork and ham,
salt, water, sugar, sodium nitrate.'' The
article doesn't really have much to do with Spam or spam. It's about emerging patterns of inattentive
reading or viewing.

The initial sp- in foreign loans typically becomes esp-. For
example, smoking (q.v.) became
esmoquin and [aother example TK]. I've known
some quite
well-educated Spanish speakers for who, either reflexively or because they
never quite mastered this bit of pronunciation, would call Spanish ``Espanish''
when speaking English. I suppose the traditional pattern was not followed in
this case because the initial-consonant cluster has become more familiar to
Spanish-speakers in recent years, due to the widespread use of English words.
(I say English words advisedly. The Spanish Sprachraum is
comfortably large, and most native Spanish-speakers do not learn much English.
Certainly as recently as thirty years ago, but it seems to me still today, the
most-studied modern foreign language in Spanish-medium secondary schools has
been French. The study of Latin also remains popular (with the schools; I
won't say it's popular with the students).

The verb spamear seems to be regularly conjugated. Hence, in the simple
present tense one has yo spameo, tú spameas, él/ella spamea,
nosotros/nosotras spameamos, etc. There is thus a subjunctive form
spamee (que spamee means `that [I/he/she/it] spam'). It's
something to keep in mind if you're counting ghits
to determine the popular English-speakers' consensus on whether the recipient
of spam is a ``spamee'' or a ``spammee.'' (The corresponding
French verb apparently yields false positives for
the spammee form.) I've decided to go with spammee.

spam trap

Anything used to prevent automated email-address harvesters from successfully collecting
one's email as a spam target. The most common spam
trap is an obvious and easily corrected alteration of the email address, as in
<nameDeleteThisBit@domain.name>. This strategy (mung) is seen in newsgroups and mailing lists, since in such
discussion groups replies are generally sent to the electronic forum rather
than to the individual poster. Here's a
July 16, 2002 article on spam traps from <poynter.org>.

SPAMIT

Stupid People At MIT. A few people who had the
idea of making and selling tee shirts decorated with the acronym ``SPAMIT'' on
them. Even the stupid people at MIT are sharp.

A macaronic mix of Spanish and English. Like franglais and italiese (q.v.), it is essentially
the Romance tongue with lots of English borrowing. English with a lot of
Romance borrowing is just English. English lexicographers report that during
the twentieth century, the Spanish language was the
largest source of borrowed vocabulary in English. I guess the
French vein was pretty much tapped out.

My cousin Victoria teaches bilingual kindergarten in California, and reports that her students' Spanglish is
grammatically correct as Spanish. I didn't ask her for details, but in my
immigrant community, fluent Spanglish use makes most borrowed nouns male and
avoids English verbs. The mixed morphology of English verbs or even adjectives
with Spanish inflections is usually so distasteful that in practice one simply
alternates between sentences or clauses entirely in one language or the other
(which Human Communication researchers call ``code-switching''). For the most
part, true Spanglish is used only by those who are not very
bilingual. (But see the RU entry for a counterexample.)

You will have noticed that Spanglish is a blend of English words, whereas
franglais and italiese are French and Italian, respectively.
That probably reflects the places where these language mixes are an issue.
One does not encounter very much franglais and italiese, at least
in the US. Spanish-speakers tend to refer to anglicismos, but if a
Spanish word for Spanglish is required, the word is very appropriately
borrowed from English, with the usual modifications. In particular, since
word-initial sp does not occur in Spanish, and since some Spanish
speakers have difficulty pronouncing it, the word is sometimes translated into
Spanish as espanglish (no, standard Spanish no longer has the esh sound
either). More rarely, one encounters the calqueespanglés (from español and inglés).

Spanish

Spanish is the English name for the most widely used Iberian language. In
Spanish itself, that language is imprecisely called español, and
more precisely castellano (`Castilian'). Among educated
Spanish-speakers, and especially among educated Argentines, it is common to use
castellano for the language and español only for
`Spaniard' or as a national adjective.

Like most national and local languages in what used to be the western half of
the Roman empire, Spanish is a Romance language (i.e., an evolution of
Vulgar Latin), and has a fair admixture of Germanic terms. Like English, it
has absorbed a lot of words from French during
the many centuries when France was culturally
dominant.

There's a lot to say about the local evolutions of Vulgar Latin into
Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian, etc., but for now I just want to
point out that in Castilian the initial eff of many Latin words became an aitch
(called hache in Spanish). One example: the standard (i.e.
``unmarked'') verb meaning `to talk,' hablar, comes from the Latin
fabula, the same root as fable in English. This is very apt.

To be fair, in classical Latin, fabula was a noun meaning `talk, conversation,' as well as one
particular kind of talk -- an untrue story, a myth -- or a play. The deponent
verb fabulari meant `talk' in the sense of chatter -- ``just talk'' or
``all talk'' or ``telling tales.'') Portuguese uses the cognate falar
(no f --> h).

For another example of the sound shift, see the hidalgo entry. Japanese provides a good
illustration of the similarity of the two sounds (eff and aitch). This, along
with other examples comparing Spanish words with their Latin etymons, is at
the higo entry.

I can't believe I link to this entry from all over the glossary, and the
only content I have is on this negligible little sound shift! Okay, here
are some links to other somewhat general things about Spanish. (For the list
items with multiple links, you don't have to return here for the rest. Follow
the first one and other relevant entries will be linked from there.)

WordReference.com, with pop-ups and
animated banners, has Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionaries that
are, so to speak, free. They offer Spanish definitions of English words and
vice versa. They're based in large part on dictionaries published
by Espasa Calpe, which is pretty classy. (Espasa Calpe also publishes the
Diccionario de la Lengua Española (DLE) of the Real Academia Española. That's
the accepted authority on spelling and a widely aped source of definitions, but
Spanish dictionaries of Spanish are not part of the WordReference.com site as
of this writing, May 2005.) There are useful links at the definitions,
evidently generated automatically by reverse lookup, and the site has
associated language discussion forums which can be searched via
links from the entries.

SpanishDICT is a smaller resource,
also with animated banners, that offers various single-word translations for
words entered in Spanish or English. Unlike WordReference.com, which gives
phonetic transcriptions, SpanishDICT has lots of clickable audio files for
pronunciation. This site also has animated banners.
Ditto <freedict.com>, which has a
similar pair of English-Spanish word-translation tools, apparently based on a
still smaller word stock than SpanishDICT's. (On the positive side, freedict
has tools for many more languages.)

I used to reference a couple of small
English to
Spanish and
Spanish to
English vocabularies that had been on the net since early in the life of
this glossary. They have become part of the Internet Dictionary Project (IDP).
Note that the Files page
hasn't been updated in a while. To download the English-Spanish Dictionary
File, which is linked to
<http://www.aracnet.com/~tyler/IDP/files/Spanish.txt>, use
<http://www.june29.com/IDP/files/Spanish.txt>.

Space Power Architecture System. That is, the architecture of a power
system for use in space. That ought to be the less pronounceable SPSA, but
no one asked me. I would also have mentioned that SPAS is bound to be
pronounced ``spaz,'' derogatory slang for a person prone to spastic or
spasmodic movements. I suppose no one would have listened.
The term SPAS and its expansion were used for a specific study for
SDI (``Star Wars''). The SDI SPAS studies were
published in 1988. Among other things, they considered the power requirements
of ground-based laser weapons, so you see that ``for use in space,'' in my
explanation above, is not restricted to use within or even originating in a
spacecraft.

spate

Flood, especially a sudden flood. Nowadays -- and by ``nowadays'' I mean
all my life -- I only hear this word in the expression ``a spate of,'' which is
understood, but not recognized as a metaphor.

SPAWARSYSCEN

SPAce and naval WARfare SYStem CENter. It's in Charleston, SC. The
headterm is a typical US military abbreviation. This glossary makes no
pretense of listing any but a small fraction. I don't feel like listing every
odd piece of the DoD.

It's a good thing each table doesn't require one member from each of the NBO's.
ABF and NZCBA have about 32 and 15 thousand members, respectively. The other
two NBO's have, uh, more than 100 members each.

SPC

Statistical Process Control. Very fashionable now, so what more do you
need to know? Get some, or implement some, or whatever.

I have a little book entitled The SPC Troubleshooting Guide, though I
have no actual SPC trouble to shoot at. In the introduction, the author makes
this emphatic point: ``It is important to understand that SPC does not control
processes. People control processes.'' [Italics in original.] You
wonder if the author wouldn't really rather have been writing about
gun control. [Italics mine.] Especially when you notice that the
author's name is Ronald Blank. For more about gun control, see
this fire hazard entry.

Here's some possibly related news. In an interview that aired on
LBC TV on February 23, 2007, Lebanese Druze Leader
Walid Jumblatt was asked whether he regretted his remarks of February 14, 2007.
He replied ``No, but the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty against
[sic, in the translation by MEMRI TV]
Animals contacted me, and said that they reject the comparison of snakes,
whales, and wild beasts to [Syrian dictator] Bashar Al-Assad. [Somewhere along
about this point, the respectful interviewer lowers his head and cups his
forehead in his hand.] I apologize to that society. But I don't regret
anything else I said.'' Jumblatt smiles very slightly. (The apology comes at
the end of this
video clip.)

SPCC

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

In 1906, when Fiorello H. La Guardia returned to the US after twenty-one years
in Europe, he worked for the SPCC in New York City, translating the juvenile
sections of the French penal code into English.

Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge. Established in London in 1968.
``SPCK is the oldest Anglican
mission agency.'' Oh wait, that was 1698. ``[A] Christian mission
agency communicating the gospel by publishing books and Christian literature,
running Christian bookshops in the UK, supporting
theological education and making grants to churches worldwide.'' ISBN prefix 0-281.

For some inexplicable reason, they also publish scholarly books on New
Testament studies.

One of their hot tips: Check that the facility that does your work has
hot and cold running water.

SPCP

Society of Professors of Child Psychiatry.

SPCS

Stored-Program Control System.

SPCW

Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary
World. ``SPCW was founded in August 1993 by philosophers who had gathered
at the very edge of Rocky Mountain National Park for a conference on `The
Community, the Family, and Culture.' Exhilarated by the unique combination of
stimulating philosophy, good fun and fellowship permeating the conference, they
resolved to expand these opportunities by creating SPCW as a nonprofit,
democratically organized Society.'' Cf. origination story told at the
seriousness entry.

S.P.D.

Salutem Plurimam Dicit. Latin for
`sends many greetings.' For details, see the S.D. entry. I'm not sure S.P.D. occurs
classically, but Bruce Magee serves some images
(1,
2,
3,
4)
and a
transcription of parchment documents from around 1859 showing use of the
abbreviation. I imagine S.P.D. is still used in some diplomas, but these
examples were convenient.

The documents are from Emory University,
which is described as being at Oxford,
Georgia. When I first visited Atlanta in 1975, I heard that the joke around
Emory University was that ``Harvard is the Emory of the North.'' The joke
arises from the conceit among alumni that Emory is the ``Harvard of the
South.'' I'm sure the claim and the joke (or both of whichever) are older than
that but I figured the bidding ought to start somewhere. The same thing is
said respecting so many other southern schools that we've milked the idea
shamelessly for content in a number of other entries:

John Harvard was
born at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1607. (William Shakespeare retired to his
home there in 1610.) In his short life, John Harvard inherited a lot of money
and bought a bunch of books. Immigrating to the religiously congenial (to
Puritans) Massachusetts Bay Colony, he died (1638) and left all his books
and half his estate toward a new school. His bequest was the main contribution
to the creation of a school planned for the colony, and in 1639 it was decided
to call the new school Harvard College. In those days, and still for many
years to come, there were only two universities in England -- Cambridge
and Oxford. At the time, Oxford was more High Church and Cambridge more
Puritan. Things were soon to get a bit bloody, but in any case, the Puritans
of Massachusetts built Harvard College in Cambridge (formerly Newtown). (We
have a Harvard architecture entry.)

In 1835, almost two hundred years after John Harvard died in Massachusetts,
Methodist Bishop John Emory died in Georgia. The Georgia Methodist Conference,
which had established a Manual Labor School near Covington in 1834, decided to
expand the school in 1836, chartering it as Emory College. Land was purchased
for a college town, and the town was named
Oxford in honor of the Wesley brothers' alma mater.

In 1915, the Methodist
Episcopal Church, South, chartered an Emory University in Atlanta. In 1919,
Emory College of Oxford, Ga., moved to Atlanta (near Buford!) (I have to check)
and became the College of Arts and Sciences of Emory University. Back in
Oxford, a junior college was founded in 1929; today it is the Oxford College of
Emory University.

Sozialdemokratischer Partei Deutschlands. `Social democratic party
of Germany.' In the early post-war years, they were
effectively locked out of power until they adopted a strong abjuration of
Marxism.

After 16 years out of power, they won a strong victory in the September 27,
1998 general elections (allocated 293 out of 669 seats in the Bundestag for
40.9% of the vote, up from 36.4 per cent in the previous elections of 1994).
Party leader Gerhard Schröder became chancellor, forming a government
coalition with the Greens (47 seats, 6.7% of the vote). The
CDU was the big loser. In elections in 2002, the
red-green coalition stayed in power.

SPD, spd

Steamer Pays Dues.

For some reason, I think this may be an outdated expression.

SPDA

Single-Premium Deferred Annuity.

SPDC

State Peace and Development Council of the Union of Myanmar. Previously
SLORC.

s,p,d,f,g,...

Common notation for orbitals (atomic states or related sets of quantum
states) of successively higher total angular momentum: s for l=0, p for l=1,
..., i for l=6, etc. The letters are sometimes capitalized, and Greek letters
are often used for molecular orbitals (especially bonding and antibonding
orbitals of sigma and pi types).

The terminology is said to represent the characteristics of the atomic
transition line spectra originally studied: s--sharp,
p--principal, d--diffuse, f--fine, g--next
letter after f. I've also seen ``fundamental'' for f, which makes
rather less sense. Even with these hints, the nomenclature is still
mysterious.

It's been suggested to me in email that the letters originally represented
German words, although I can't find much evidence of this on the Internet. I'm
not going to jinx myself by writing that it shouldn't be hard to chase this
thing down. It could be hard. What I have found so far is that in 1913 (the
year Bohr first published his revolutionary quantum theory of the atom),
astronomers were using ``sharp,'' ``principal,'' and ``diffuse'' to describe
various series of spectroscopic lines, mostly in the solar spectrum.

So the terminology originally had to do primarily with hydrogen lines, and the
``principal'' series of lines were those of the Balmer series. (Another p
series was probably the Pickering lines found in discharge tubes, which had
about the same frequency ratios and which Bohr in 1913 correctly reassigned to
helium.) The ``sharp'' lines corresponded to the Lyman series, and the
``diffuse'' to the Paschen series. Thus, the letters s, p, and d were
originally assigned to transitions whose lower-energy state had principal
quantum number n = 1, 2, and 3, respectively. In the Old Quantum
Theory, the orbits (computed first Bohr, and later by Sommerfeld and many
others) had angular momentum equal to nħ (ħ is my best
hbar in HTML). In the later quantum
mechanics, the energies of states for n>1 were found to be degenerate, with
different states taking all non-negative values of total angular momentum
quantum number (l) up to n. Thus, the meanings of s, p, d, etc. were again
reassigned, so now s represented l=0, etc., as described in the first
paragraph.

You might as well know that this entry is rather more under construction than
most other entries in this glossary. Let's hope I don't wax too philosophical.

Solid Polymer Electrolyte. A trademarked name
equivalent to the generic term PEM, q.v.

SPEAR

Stanford
Positron-Electron Accelerating Ring. A colliding-beam storage ring
completed in 1972. The electron and positron beams each had energied up to
4 GeV. In 1974 the J/psi was discovered there, and in 1976 the tau lepton.

SPE

Synchronous Payload Envelope.

SPEAK Test

Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit Test. The institutional form
of the Test of Spoken English (TSE), a taped and
timed test developed by the ETS.
The SPEAK requires the test-taker to reply orally to both written and
recorded ``stimuli'' (not necessarily precise instructions or questions).

Mass per unit something else. In space power systems, specific mass is
usually mass per unit power (typically measured in kilograms per kilowatt).
(Or, equivalently, megawatts per metric ton. That's the trouble with strictly
metric units: it's so hard to come up with new measures that aren't trivially
related to old measures.)

The plural of spectrum. Thus, it is
incorrect to say ``Magnesium has a spectra ...'' no matter how accurately
you have studied that metal.

S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

The SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and
Extortion. Hmmm... It looks like that ought to be ``SP.E.C.T.R.E.'' Sorry
about that, Chief. (Refreshingly, or perhaps appropriately,
KAOS doesn't stand for
anything.)

S.P.E.C.T.R.E. was a fictional terrorist organization led by Ernst Stavro
Blofeld. It plays the role in James Bond movies that the nonfictional, or at
least once-existent, SMERSH does in various James
Bond novels. However, S.P.E.C.T.R.E. made its first appearance in Ian
Fleming's novel Thunderball. (Mmmm, you're supposed to already know
that Ian Fleming created the James Bond character in a series of novels, the
first published in 1953, that were made into movies. After Fleming died in
1964, the franchise was continued by a number of authors, many of whom can
hardly have needed the money.)

spectroscopy

Spectroscopy is, broadly speaking, the probing of a physical system's
energy levels (spectrum). This is mostly done
by studying its interactions with an external source of ``light'' (i.e.
electromagnetic radiation). The ``interaction'' may be absorption, stimulated
emission, scattering (inelastic (Raman) or elastic), essentially
instantaneously or over time (photon, magnon and other echo experiments,
pump-probe experiments). Some spectroscopies probe with more than one
frequency, as for example some kinds of pump-probe experiment, or probe
response to the interaction with more than a single photon (e.g.,
two-photon absorption). This list is quite incomplete.

The set of modes or energies of a system, or a closely related
energy-dependent function.

Some parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are rather densely assigned.

spec zoo

SPECulative ZOOlogy. A genre of science fiction that mistakes itself for
science. It's populated by hippogriffs, chimeras, and memes.

sped

Past and past participle forms of the verb speed.

sped

SPecial EDucation. Pejorative term for students tracked into special
education programs. For further related discussion, see the Retarded entry.

One of the fad fights in K-12 education today is the tracking war. One
camp in this war has an obvious solution to the problems that the word
sped is a token of. They would mainstream all children. That way,
instead of being stigmatized for taking slow classes, they'd be stigmatized
for failing regular classes. No wait, that wouldn't happen: the classes
would be challenging -- standards would not suffer -- but at the same time
no one would fail. ``Leave no child behind.'' Force that knowledge
into them! If it's a little bit harder, fine, let them study a little longer
-- ten, twelve, twenty hours every evening.

A book by Karl Taro Greenfield, subtitled ``Days and Nights with Japan's
Next Generation'' and published in 1994. Its dozen chapters are profiles of
people in Japan, many but not all of them on the margins of society.

spelled backwards

Not a classy or imaginative way to come up with a new name. Trust me
on this one. Anyway, you still have it the wrong way around; what you want is
the backward spelling entry.

spelling

I don't have a lot to say about spelling that I wanted to put into a
dedicated entry, but I needed a place to put a link to one of the most
deliciously inept pages I've seen on the web. It was some user's file called
religion.html at Columbia University, going on about the College of William and
Mary. Unfortunately, it's off the web now, but here's a gem that I preserved:

... And order to insured that the english way of life, they appointed Reverend
James Blair as president. In my opinion the college was established to
revile Harvard. ...

spelling in lyrics

This is an entry to list songs whose lyrics include spellings out, as I
think of or encounter them.

Aerosmith: ``What It Takes''

``Girl, before I met you I was F-I-N-E fine.''

Hurriganes: ``Tallahassee Lassie''

``Yeah, my Tallahassee Lassie / Down in F-L-A.'' (There was at
least one other hit song to use ``F-L-A'' in the lyrics, and doubtless
many others that were not hits used it.)

Aretha Franklin: ``Respect''

``R-E-S-P-E-C-T / Find out what it means to me /
R-E-S-P-E-C-T / Take care, TCB.''

Fergie: ``Glamorous''

``G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S, yeah / G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S.''
(These are Fergie's first lyrics in the song, but they're preceded by
a couple of lines by Ludacris. It may amuse you to know that no fewer
than five people are credited as songwriters for this song: Jamal
Jones, William Adams, Christopher Bridges [Ludacris], Stacy Ferguson
[Fergie], and Elvis Williams.)

The Bay City Rollers: ``Saturday Night''

``S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y, night!''

J.J. Fad: ``Supersonic''

``See, the `J' is for just, the other for jammin' /
The `F' is for Fresh, `A' and `D' def.''
(I haven't actually heard this work, and I have no plans to.
The group name originally stood for Juana, Juanita, Fatima, And Dania.
FWIW,
five song-writers are credited: Fatimah Shaheed, Juana Michelle Burns,
Dania Maria Birks, Kim R. Nazel, Juanita A. Lee.)

Self-described as ``a professional organization devoted to supporting
philosophy inspired by Continental European traditions.'' This is a
thought-provoking use of the word professional. That word is derived
from the verb profess, as confessional is derived from the verb
confess. Not too long ago, one could speak of professing a
religion, and one's ``confession'' was one's particular religion, so
confession and profession were virtual synonyms.

SPEP explains that it
was founded ``in 1962 at Northwestern University, and, as its name
suggests, was focused on existentialism and phenomenology. Since that time it
has embraced and incorporated other traditions, notably hermeneutics, critical
theory, postmodernism or poststructuralism, and feminist theory oriented toward
continental writers. In the background there is often the study of German
idealism and, for that matter, diverse moments in the history philosophy seen
in continental perspective. From time to time it is suggested that the society
change its name so as more accurately to represent its activity, but for
historical reasons the decision has been to stay with SPEP.''

SPEP is the most numerous society for continental philosophy in North America.

spetsnaz

A contraction of the Russian spetsialnoye
naznacheniye, meaning `special purpose,' or voiska
spetsialnogo naznacheniya, `special-purpose units.' (Pardon
the inflections -- I'm doin' the best I can. I trust you recognized the
spetsial- root as a cognate of special.) In Russian,
spetsnaz is equivalent to the English term `special forces.' In
English, spetsnazis equivalent to the term `Russian special forces.'
Cf.commando.

A major source of information on spetsnaz up to the 1980's is the little book
Spetsnaz: The Inside Story of the Soviet Special Forces (1987), by
Vladimir Rezun, a GRU defector writing under the
pseudonym ``Viktor Suvorov.'' (The book occasionally sounds a trifle
breathless, but that's a matter of taste. It's pretty meaty in facts and
examples. An unrepresentative little bit from the book is misquoted at the
razvedka entry.)

Special Professional Faculty. Special in this expression often means what
Extraordinarius used to imply in the German university system:
underprivileged, not tenured.

SPF

Spruce Pine Fir.

SPF

Sun Protection Factor. Sunscreen strength. Back when SPF values were
new, 18 was high. SPF values gave consumers a somewhat objective way to
compare products, and SPF values immediately started to climb, so 25 is a
pretty ordinary value now. A typical tee-shirt has an SPF of about 6.

SPF factor is defined as the ratio of the exposure time required to get
sunburned without protection to the exposure time required with protection.
(Therefore, wearing a pair of typical tee shirts, one over the other, should
result in an SPF of over 36.)
Evidently, this is not just a property of the sunscreen substance but also
of the thickness applied. Moreover, since different sunscreens are filters
with different wavelength dependences, determination of SPF requires some
model of the skin. And of course, skin varies. Stay inside.

A distinction is made between ``chemical'' sunscreens, which absorbUV light, and ``physical'' sunscreens, which reflect it
(actually scatter diffusely, unless you wear little bits of mirror). Despite
the name, ``chemical'' sunscreens do not generally undergo a chemical reaction.
They absorb light into electronic excitations, and the electrons cascade down
and reemit longer-wavelength radiation. Much of this radiation is absorbed by
the body, so for a given SPF, you probably get hotter wearing chemical
sunscreen than wearing physical sunscreen. Some products work by both
mechanisms. You can probably use this information to meet chicks at the beach.
Just walk up to a supine female and explain this. But then, Walter Mitty,
stand back, because nowadays girls weight-train too.

I've been accused of putting a lot of irrelevant information into
these glossary entries. Falso.

Tallulah Bankhead once commented that ``they used to photograph Shirley Temple
through gauze. They ought to photograph me through linoleum.''

SPFC

Solid-Polymer Fuel Cell. A term equivalent to
PEFC (polymer-electrolyte
FC) because these polymers are used in the solid
state. (There are good reasons for this. One is that temperatures high enough
to melt the polymers accelerate the degradation of the polymer by oxidation.)
Also, the electrolytes operate wet, so operating them
above 100°C adds to the engineering problems.

The most common term for this kind of fuel cell, as explained at the PEFC entry, is PEMFC. Oddly enough, most of our
information on this kind of fuel cell, if we have any, will be deposited at the
PEMFC entry.

SPFW, SP/FW

Scotch Plains / FanWood. Two towns in North Jersey that at various times and
in various ways have been a single municipality. The local paper is The Times of Scotch Plains - Fanwood (under
a joint publishing arrangement with the Westfield Leader).

Most of the municipalities in the area were formed by secession from a previous
larger entity -- Springfield (1793), Westfield (1794), Rahway (1804), Union
(1808), and New Providence (1809) seceding in turn from Elizabeth (then called
Elizabethtown), Plainfield seceding from Westfield in 1847, those seven
townships separating from Newark-dominated Essex County to form Union County in
1857. (There were other shifts -- part of Rahway, for example, was part of the
original Westfield.) Many of the town names were names of villages or areas
dating back to the colonial era (in particular, [Queen] Elizabeth town, the
spring fields, the west fields, the plain fields). In 1877, the village of
Scotch plains (known as the Scotsplains when it was homesteaded by Scots in
East Jersey colony) seceded from Westfield and became Fanwood Township. It's
not certain why it was called Fanwood, but one story is related to the fact
that the area long resisted expansion by the Central Jersey Railroad. The
story goes that when the Jersey Central finally managed to put a depot there,
it was named for spite after the daughter of the President of the railroad,
``Fanny.'' Maybe. In 1895, the same year that farmers in the northern part of
Westfield seceded to form the Borough of Mountainside, a part of Fanwood
Township seceded to form Fanwood Borough. In 1917, the rump Fanwood Township
changed its name back to Scotch Plains.

Probably the greatest degree of integration remaining between Fanwood and
Scotch Plains is in the educational system. Fanwood has never had its own
high school, and has sent its high-school age children to schools in
Plainfield, Westfield, or Scotch Plains. There is currently a single Scotch Plains-Fanwood School
District, and Scotch Plains and Fanwood share a common SPFW High School.

Although Fanny Wood Day celebrates Fanwood Borough specifically, the Miss
Fanny Wood contest is open to girls between the ages of 3 and 12 from both
Fanwood and Scotch Plains.

Princeton, like Fanwood between 1895 and 1917, consists of a governmentally
distinct Borough (downtown) and Township. Princeton was originally named for
Frederick, Prince of Wales. Frederick was son of King George II and heir
presumptive until he died on 20 March
(O.S.) or 31 March
(N.S.) 1751 at Leicester House in London. George
II was succeeded as King by his grandson (and Frederick's son), George III, in
October 1760. There's a dismissive squib about Frederick that ends

As it's only poor Fred
Who was alive and is dead,
There's no more to be said.

The middle name adopted by jazz pianist and composer
Thelonious
Monk (1917-1982). A sphere is smooth.

In researching this particular glossary item, I chanced upon Monk on
Records: a Discography of Thelonious Monk compiled by Leen Bijl and
F. Canté (2nd. edn. 1985). A testimonial, from a letter
to the compilers, 1982.08.30, is Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter's
declaration that

I think this is an absolutely monumental work, and there is certainly
not another one like it in existence . . . (The look and the feel of it are
also a tremendous gas!!!)

The second the occurring in the parallel structure in the parenthetical
is grammatically acceptable, but inconsistent with the mood or style of
``tremendous gas!!!'' It looks like a translation error.

I'm losing my mind. At least I have a mind to lose.

At an appearance before the UNCF, then-Vice
President of the United States of America J. Danforth Quayle mangled the
group's famous slogan (``A mind is a terrible thing to waste''):

`` `What a terrible thing it is to lose one's mind.' How true that is.''

Only in 1997, George Herbert Walker Bush finally came out and admitted that he
``blew it'' in choosing Quayle as a running mate. Well, probably so (unless it
prevented his assassination), but his timing was interesting: he made this
admission just as Texas governor George W. Bush, was being touted as a contender for the
Republican presidential nomination, and thus a competitor of JDQ.

SPHS

Society for the Promotion of
Hellenic Studies. ``The Hellenic Society'' for short. Founded in 1879 to
``advance the study of Greek language, literature,
history, art and archaeology in the Ancient, Byzantine and Modern periods.''
Literally to advance the study of ancient archaeology may not be exactly what
they had in mind, but it's not wrong in principle. After the Romans conquered
Asia Minor, they attempted a restoration of Bronze Age Troy.

The Society for Philosophical
Inquiry. ``SPI's diverse members are devoted to resuscitating the once
time-honored art and skill of Socratic philosophical inquiry.'' Now what
exactly do they mean by that?

SPI

Society of the Plastics Industry, Inc. They have a ``plastics coding
system'' (PCS) for use in recycling plastic
containers. (One increasingly finds these codes embossed on the bases of
disposable plastic cups and bottles: the number is in a small triangular
recycle symbol, and the acronym code is below this.)

Suborbital Polarimeter for Inflation, Dust and the Epoch of Reionization.
``Suborbital'' here means balloon-borne, or
aeroStatic. ``Inflation'' refers to
inflationary theories of cosmogony -- i.e., modified versions of the
Big Bang theory (or more precisely of what happened shortly after the Big
Bang), of the sort first proposed by Alan Guth. Inflationary theories predict
that during the epoch of reionization, primordial gravitational waves would
have left a signature in the polarization of what is now the cosmic microwave
background (CMB) radiation. The SPIDER experiment
uses six telescopes looking at single microwave wavelengths, surveying the sky
together aboard a high-altitude balloon. The telescopes have to be kept very
cold to minimize the local heat background.

A similar previous experiment, BICEP, which used observations at a single
microwave wavelength, claimed to have detected the polarization, and here's
where the ``dust'' comes in. Doubt was cast on the positive BICEP results
when it was suggested that the measured polarization pattern might have been
caused by interstellar dust. SPIDER uses two wavelengths in order to
measure gravitational lensing along the line of sight, and thus control for the
effects of interstellar dust.

The project is led by physicists at Caltech and Princeton, but as is usual for
large projects it is a collaboration involving researchers at many
universities. The author of a blog called Dropping BallAst wrote ``I am a graduate
student in Physics at the University of Toronto. I work on the balloon-borne
telescopes SPIDER (Suborbital Polarimeter for Inflation, Dust, and the Epoch of
Reionization--my first scientific acronym creation!) and
BLASTpol (Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for
polarization). This is a place for photographs that I, and others, take along
the way.''

Entries for BICEP (and BLASTpol, whatever that stands for)
KOMING, but right now I'm under deadline
pressure.

SPIE

``Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation
Engineers'' when founded in 1955. Later, the increasingly
old-fashioned-sounding ``Photo-optical'' was changed to ``Photometric and.''
Now it's apparently given up on backronymesque
updates and simply styles itself ``SPIE -- The International Society for
Optical Engineering.'' My own personal opinion, which is available to you
right here over the Internet free of charge to me, is that proper nouns should
not include appositive phrases. (The US Dept. of the Interior seems to agree,
since they undertook an aggressive campaign to get people to call ``Smokey the
Bear'' by the more anthropomorphic-sounding ``Smokey Bear.'' I think this was
under Bush père or Clinton, when Waste, Fraud, and Abuse were
back in style.)

There doesn't seem to be a common or established term for initialisms like
SPIE, whose expansions have been, so to speak, compressed. We recommend
sealed acronyms (q.v.).

Spiegel

German: `mirror.' An early borrowing (before the second Germanic Sound
Shift) from Latinspeculum.
Der Spiegel is a popular German
weekly news and current-affairs magazine.

The name spinel is applied both to a gem (picture at the Smithsonian
or from Amethyst
Galleries' Mineral Gallery) and to a class of minerals that have the same
or almost the same crystalline structure. All spinels have the chemical
formula A2BO4, where A and B are cations (ions of
metallic elements). For the particular red gem that is spinel, A is aluminum
and B is magnesium: Al2MgO4.

spin-off

This term is defined at the spin-out entry
below. But since you probably know what it means already, I'll mention here
that in addition to the spin-off show (the usual sense of spin-off,
methinks), there are also spin-off characters. For example, Falstaff was a
character in ``Henry IV'' who was spun off to ``The Merry Wives of Windsor.''
(Or maybe ``spun-out.'' Whatever would have been the appropriate Early Modern
English term.) For another spin on spin-off, see the Navy NCIS entry.

Spin seems to accumulate British/American lexical differences. See, for
another instance, the english entry.

spin-out

In American varieties of English, spin-out is the event of a
vehicle (car, motorcycle, surf-board, etc.) spinning out of the appropriate
configuration for untroubled movement (not the same as jack-knife).

In British varieties, a spin-out is what in North America is usually
called a ``spin-off.'' That is, the equivalent in human activity of a child in
biology: a continuing venture separated off from an earlier activity: a TV
serial based on characters from an earlier series (which usually continues
also); a commercial product originally developed for internal research or
support purposes of an academic or business project, that is pursued as a
separate business venture, etc.

This is rated in a New Yorker magazine ``Talk of the
Town'' review as ``a heady blend.'' However, the fact that the components
are combined in small-integer proportions strongly suggests that -- like a
circuit with all 100 and 1000 ohm resistors
-- it has not been optimized. Nevertheless, Yerofeyev stresses that the key is
using only White Lilac. Apparently Lily of the Valley Silver makes you think
sad thoughts and cry (at least if drunk straight). Jasmine and Sweetbrier

The Yerofeyev book had been Englished by H. William Tjalsma and given the title
Moscow to the End of the Line. (That publication spells the author's
name as Venedikt Erofeev, but you realize that the surname with wyes is more
phonetically accurate, since the E-like character in the Russian name is
``soft'' (palatalized). But they all transliterate with final v's these days,
even though Russian like German devoices v (spelled with a B-like character)
into f when it occurs in final postion. Tjalsma also translated Tears of a
Komsomol Girl (see below) in the singular (Tear of a).

Hydrochloric acid. It's an old term. Well, it was old in 1919, when the
second edition of James Francis Hobart's Soft Soldering, Hard Soldering and
Brazing was published by D. Van Nostrand Company. I believe the term is
still old. (The book is
available here from
Google Books.) Chapter VI, ``Difficult Operations in Soldering,'' has a
section on pp. 99-100 entitled ``Spirits of Salt,'' reproduced here:

Occasionally a tinner, particularly one of the old school, may be heard
to tell about soldering with ``spirits of salt.'' When hearing this dealer in
would-be mysteries thus setting forth his supposed superior knowledge one may
smile to himself because he knows that the fellow really means hydrochloric
acid. Common salt is chloride of sodium and hydrochloric acid is simply water
which absorbed chlorine gas [absorbed HCl, actually], as noted previously.
Hydrochloric acid may be made by the action of sulphuric acid on common salt.
[It's your typical strong-acid-to-weak-acid reaction, helped along by the fact
that the reaction is conducted at high temperature, reducing the solubility of
HCl.] The result is a large quantity of chlorine [again: HCl -- hydrogen
chloride] in the form of gas, which may be caught by water until the latter
becomes saturated. The remainder of the salt is changed into a carbonate
[actually a sulfate: Na2SO4] instead of a chloride by
action of the acid and becomes [with further processing] washing soda or
salsoda, and by refinement bicarbonate of soda, or cooking soda, such as is
used for household purposes.

The tinner sometimes calls muriatic acid ``spirits of salt,'' because of
the manner in which it may be obtained, as above described. When he speaks of
``killed spirits of salt'' he means hydrochloric or muriatic acid in which
has been dissolved all the zinc it will take up or ``cut.''

What Hobart had in mind here was the
Leblanc process.
The sodium sulfate from the first reaction is burned with limestone (mostly
CaCO3) and coal (C; you might even say
C++), outgassing CO2 and leaving behind
calcium sulfide (CaS) and sodium carbonate (Na2CO3). The
sulfide is insoluble, so the carbonate can be recovered by washing the ashes.
Sodium carbonate is known by various names (depending on its application),
including washing soda. The Leblanc process was patented by Nicolas Leblanc in
1791 and was in widespread use for most of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it
was still common when Hobart went to school. In 1861 Ernest Solvay developed a
more efficient alternative method of manufacturing sodium carbonate, and by the
time of this book's first edition (1912), the Solvay method was dominant. In
1938, however, large deposits of trona
[Na3(HCO3)(CO3)·2H2O --
hydrated sodium bicarbonate carbonate] were discovered in the US, and since
then the mining of this material has made the Solvay process obsolete as well,
in North America.
(If you see this text, you're probably using a
text-based browser and it's likely that the character immediately preceding
2H2O above -- a middle dot -- is not displayed properly.)

Spirituality

If you're looking here for guidance, brother you made a wrong turn
somewhere.

spit-ball

A SPIT-moistened small BALL of wadded-up of paper. Ammo for rubber-band
arms. Something you learn in school.

Series Programming Language. A programming language for use with
DADiSP. By report of DADiSP's developers (DSP
Development Corp.), and to judge from random code snippets at their site; SPL
resembles C/C++. (I do notice
that like Perl, it seems to allow lists as
lvalues.)

Scanning-Probe Microscop{e|y}. Any of various surface-imaging schemes
that rely on scanning with a very fine tip. Includes the closely related
pair of techniques Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM)
and Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM), and Magnetic
Force Microscopy (MFM), qq.v.. Here's a short practical bit
on these. Other variations include SThM.

Alarm pheromones of the ant species Formica obscuripes were
investigated. Volatile compounds in the headspace above
aggravated worker ants were collected by solid-phase
microextraction (SPME) and analyzed using gas
chromatograph-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Analysis
revealed the presence of the suspected alarm pheromones
decane, undecane, tridecane, 4-tridecene, pentadecane, and
heptadecane, as well as several unidentified components. The
identities of the straight-chain hydrocarbons were confirmed by
comparison with mass spectra of authentic samples. The
location of the double bond in 4-tridecene was determined by a
standard methylthiolation derivatization technique.

(New Jersey, for instance) State Police Office of Emergency Management.

spoiler

Premature information that spoils enjoyment of some entertainment.
Typically a description of how a story turns out. Less often the answer to a
riddle. The Movie Spoiler
Center has an alphabetized list of spoilers for movies of the 1990's.

Simultaneous Peripheral Operation On-Line. A punnishing acronym, or most
likely a stealth backronym. The
``simultaneous'' is the connection of various other devices to the peripheral,
which is an output device. The spool is a queue for outputing temporary files.
Get the low-down on
SPOOL and
spool from FOLDOC.

Spoon

Old name for a three wood (golf club).

spoon

Verb: to stack or store like objects in a row, in such a way that
one side of each object conforms with the opposite side of the next, like
spoons in a stack; to be stored or storable in such manner.

Species (plural). Singular is sp. (If you need
to be bored out of your mind, I can recommend that entry very highly.) It's
unusual that the abbreviation gives more information than the word abbreviated.

Senate and People of Rome. [Latin: Senatus PopulusQue Romanus.]
Good thing they decided to pull the Q into the acronym, so we can
distinguish this from the frequently occurring SPR).

The argument has been made that the Q stands for Quirites, rather
than simply representing an earlier stage of orthography in which the
que was regarded as a separate word. (At the time, word spacing was not
used, so the distinction is not easy to discover. Try to imagine how one could
determine from literature whether non in words like noncupative
is just a separate syllable or a separate word,
ifEnglishwerewrittenwithoutwordspacing.

Incidentally, S.P.Q.R. was revived again as late as the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. According to Robert Brentano, Rome Before Avignon: A Social
History of Thirteenth-Century Rome (Basic Books, 1974), p. 94:

[Rome] had its own money, the denari provisini senatus, of the type of
Champagne (which had been used in Rome particularly between 1154 and 1184),
issued by the senate after 1184, with `Roma caput mundi' inscribed on its
obverse and `Senatus P.Q.R.' on its reverse.

Boundary stones with the inscription S.P.Q.R. were used as late as 1234, during
a failed effort to throw off papal dominion.

SPR

Services de protection contre les rayonnements.
You know, the cool thing about French is, it's a
lot like English with some extra letters thrown in (mostly silent). In fact,
basically -- I mean, pretty much -- French
is almost completely derived from English (through Latin). You'd think you'd hardly need a dictionary,
but you have to be careful. You might get tripped up by a faux ami and make a faux pas. For example, in the expansion of
SPR above, it looks like rayonnements must be some artificial fibers,
and SPR some sort of ScotchGard-like treatment or something. This is wrong.
In fact, rayonnements is the French spelling of `raiments' or `dress.'
SPR will take in your woolens and furs for safekeeping over the hot Summer
months. They're shipped to Australia, where they experience Winter during
Summer, so your cozy things will feel wanted and welcome. All for just 7.5
euros per kilo. The same organization also rents out bathing suits.

Holy cloth! It turns out that some of the details above are slightly off! I'm
going to have to research this further. Okay, I think I've got it now. SPR is
a special religious ceremony (hence the archaic `raiment' terminology) for
divine intercession on behalf of clothing, to prevent holey cloth, say. It
works equally well against wool moths and color-fast ketchup. (Nevertheless,
you should also use napkins and mothballs too, to demonstrate the sincerity of
your religious convictions and the intensity of your longing for immaculate
clothing made from whole cloth.) Responsive reading will begin on page one of
Sartor
Resartus (the Book of Thomas Carlyle).

For an accurate translation of SPR, visit the entry for the
FrenchCEA. Cf.OPRI.

SPR

Society for Psychical Research. You shouldn't need a URL to find them.
Founded in 1882 at Cambridge. One of its founders (F. W. H. Myers) coined the
word telepathy that year, on the pattern of telegraphy.

Shhh! I hear ... tapping! Morse code from the other side! Spirit:
if you read me reply ``e''!

SPR

Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Clever name -- almost suggests we have a
petroleum strategy.

SPR

Surface Plasmon Resonance.

Sprachraum

German term meaning `language region.' The Polish Sprachraum is the region
where Polish is spoken (or claimed to be spoken).

An annual pilgrimage from universities to the places where the ``pilgrims''
hope to ``get lucky.'' Specifically, it is a time each year when professors
converge on Washington, DC, to visit their
sugar-daddies and sugar-mommas at the research funding agencies.

Springsteen demographic

New Jersey voters who heed ``the Boss.'' I've seen it described as
``students and their blue collar parents'' and ``record-buyers older than
forty.''

SPRINT

Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications (Department).
It seems they branched out into the external market.

Satellite Power System. No, not a system to power a satellite (that's
conventionally designated a ``space power system''). A proposed
system, or class of systems, studied in the seventies, to place solar
collectors in geosynchronous orbit, converting collected energy to microwaves
that would be beamed down to receiving antennas (``rectennas'') on the earth's surface. US studies
focused on rectennas in the Mojave desert, and microwaves in vicinity of
2.45 GHz, delivering 5-10 gigawatts per
antenna.

Among the various potential problems contemplated were ohmic heating of the
ionosphere; health effects on humans of foreseeable submilliwatt/sq.cm. chronic
exposures and larger intermittent exposures; chemical toxicity from large
amounts of fuel and exhaust needed to put the systems in orbit (using
heavy-lift launch vehicles (HLLV's)];
climatological effects; electromagnetic interference (EMI), mostly to military systems -- we're talking
Mojave desert here, remember;
and occupational hazards to earthbound and astronaut workers.

The idea never got off the ground, as they say, but it did generate a publicity
buzz. People tend to worry a lot about being microwaved -- it's probably a
primal fear, along with fear of snakes, spiders, and falling on one's face. A
year or two after the ozone hole was discovered in Antarctica, shepherds in
southern Argentina (.ar) started reporting blind
sheep. [For all I know, this is how cigarette pushers got the idea of
marketing to the cartoon-receptive with a camel that wore dark glasses.] It
took years to convince residents of Clarence (near Buffalo, NY) that they
would not be harmed by Doppler radar the National Weather Service was trying
to install there.

The Japanese are always on the lookout for out-of-this-world ways to get power,
since they have negligible domestic energy resources. After the
Pons-Fleischmann thing was widely discredited, the Japanese government
continued to fund research along those lines -- what the heck: very low
probability of success, very high potential return if it works. Zero times
infinity, could be something. I thought of this when I learned that in FY1998-2000, the Japanese Space Agency
(NASDA) funded research (literature-survey,
theoretical, and simulation) into SPS. They considered both the microwave scheme usually considered and laser power
transmission using fiber-array lasers. [See M. Mori, H. Nagayama, Y. Saito and
H. Matsumoto, ``Summary of studies on space solar power systems of the National
Space Development Agency of Japan,'' Acta Astronautica, vol. 54,
#5, pp. 337-345 (2004).]

An idea related to satellite power systems, but without the conversion
losses and difficulties, is direct use of satellite-redirected solar light
-- you know, deploy enormous mylar sheets oriented to illuminate the Arctic
night/winter. The Russian Space Agency tried this once.

SPS

Serial Port Select (voltage level, pin).

SPS

Service Propulsion Subsystem. The main propulsion engines on the Apollo
spacecraft, firing from the base of the cylindrical service module. They
generated 20,500 pounds of thrust.

SPS

Short-Period Superlattice[s]. One to three monolayers per material.

SPS

Social and Political Science. I refrain from applying scare quotes. I
might not know where to begin.

Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. SPSS enables social
scientists with no mathematical competence to generate sophisticated-looking
results that are utterly invalid. Some people think this is a problem, but
it's really the whole point.

Eventually the perpetrators of SPSS realized that there are others who have a
poor understanding of and correspondingly great respect for statistics. They
could derive similar benefits from this kind of software. The current line of
SPSS products is marketed mostly to business, under the new acronym expansion
``Statistical Product and Service
Solutions.''

SPSS was originally created by Stanford University graduate students Norman H.
Nie (now Chairman of the Board of SPSS, Inc.), C. Hadlai (Tex) Hull and Dale
Bent. (It was originally written in FORTRAN 66.)

SPST

Single-pole, single throw. A switch with two rest positions, one in
which it is open, and one in which it closes a single circuit.

SPT

Society for Philosophy and
Technology. Founded in 1976. As of this writing, they hold international
meetings biennially: in Europe the year following a leap year, in North America
the year preceding. The fourth meeting: July 20-22, 2005, at Delft University
of Technology in Delft, The Netherlands. (``And Delft is of course well-known
for its blue earthenware and for the 17th century painter Johannes Vermeer.''
Who?) The fifth meeting (``SPT 2007''): July 8-11, 2007, in Charleston, South
Carolina, The US. The theme of the conference will be Globalisation and
Technology. (``Charleston is one of America's oldest and most beautiful port
cities with a very lively tourism and nightlife scene.'' Hiya there,
sailor-technologist! Had any good Kant lately? What's a hot-shot philosopher
like you doing in a dive like this? What's your signifier... or signified, as
the case may be? Hey babe, let's lose that old categorical imperative and
break loose! Please don't use that terrible word ``cheating''! I am simply
forced to find an alternative form of release because my students just don't
understand me.)

(For the punctuationally astute, I note that yes, indeed, there is no comma
before the with phrase in the description of Charleston.)
The SPT publishes a peer-reviewed journal called Futilité. No
wait -- it's called Techné. And a newsletter.

SPT

Strawberry Pop-Tart. If you can sacrifice some toasters, SPT's double as
disposable blow-torches, according to Dave Barry and this research that he inspired. The
research was performed using the non-frosted variety of the product. See also
this AIP entry.

As part of my own research for the insulation
entry, I acquired a matched pair (2) of frosted strawberry Kellogg's Pop-Tarts.
The microwave cooking instructions call for three seconds at a ``high'' setting.
An important safety instruction: ``Do not leave toasting appliance unattended
due to risk of fire.''

Smallest Publishable Unit. Except that in the fields I am familiar with,
it's usually called a ``Least Publishable Unit'' (LPU).

SPU

Summa Plus Ultra. My but we're good!

spuds if pug dish of pig

Mnemonic for remembering the sequence
spdsfpgdshfpig. This is the order (by increasing energy) of states
filled in a nuclear shell model. The letters label orbital angular momentum
(s, p, d ... for L = 0, 1, 2 ...). One
knows to ignore u and the first two i's because the shell-model
energy levels are close to those of a harmonic oscillator (a common first-order
model for the self-consistent [Hartree] nuclear potential), and these could not
appear so early. The radial quantum number can be inferred simply from the
number of times an angular momentum value has appeared in the count, so the
order is

1s, 1p, 1d, 2s, 1f, 2p, 1g,
2d, 3s, 1h, 2f, 3p, 1i, 2g,
...

The order
given ignores spin-orbit coupling, which is sufficiently important that
ignoring it yields mostly wrong magic numbers (2, 8, 20, 28, 40, 58, 70, 92,
112 and 138). When spin-orbit coupling is taken account of, a level with
orbital angular momenum L (and spin 1/2), having degeneracy
(2L+1)×(2½+1) = 2(2L+1), is split into J = L+½ and
J = L-½ levels with degeneracies 2J+1. The spin-orbit splitting
is comparable to the unsplit-level separation, leading to a different set
of magic numbers, viz., the correct values
2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, 126 and 184.

To trip over one's words in angry or surprised excitement. To utter
while spitting. To seem to speak German with eyebrows raised.

sputter

Of an engine: to nearly stall out.

sputum

We just put this entry here to yank Katie Couric's gold chain.

SPV

Self-Propelled Vehicle. A particular kind of train built by the Budd
Company, intended as a successor to the RDC. You
can get an idea of how successful they were from the other expansion that
became popular: Seldom Powered Vehicles. Full name was SPV-2000,
reflecting the hope that they would continue in service to that year. Uh-uh.
Manufactured in 1980, mothballed within a few years.
Although they did not continue to be manufactured, many of them were put back
into service after being refurbished, mostly as coaches
(renamed ``Constitution Liners'').
This page has more
detail for some SPV's used on the Shore Line East Commuter Railroad.

Spin-Polarized X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy.
XPS using photoelectron detectors that can determine
electron spin. Visit this description
served by Christopher Walker.

SP-100

The name of a planned nuclear reactor system for use on US space missions,
with a nominal 100-kWe power output. The program to develop the SP-100 was
also called SP-100. The latter SP-100 operated between 1983 and 1994. As
planned, SP-100 would have used 140 kg of 235U in uranium nitride,
and as structured, it could have been used as the power source for a large ion
propulsion system as well as for more conventional electrical loads.

sp³s*

Nearest-neighbor tight-binding model for the electronic band structures
of semiconductors, very successful in explaining the shallow-deep donor
problem.

Shorter Q. This is a hypothesized short version
of Q consisting mostly of saying material, that plays a role in the 3ST. Possibly it is a first redaction of Q (Q1).

SQ

SubCUtaneous. It's not an insult to the under-cute. It's just about
getting just under your skin. Administering or self-administering an SQ
injection is called ``skin-popping'' in druggie slang. You'd have to be high
to consider that a euphemism. Cf.IA,
IM, and especially IV.

squaric acid

Cyclobutane with a carboxyl group at each corner. First synthesized by
Sid Cohen.

SQuare FooT or SQuare FeeT. And you thought you had problems
finding shoes that fit.

SQL

Structured Query Language. I've heard it pronounced both ``ess cue ell''
and ``sequel.'' This is a serious problem, because often it is pronounced
differently by people who are related or in a relationship, and SQL is the user
front end to a relational database management
system. It's an ISO and
ANSI standard. It's apparently not a very
standardized standard. Or perhaps it's a very standardized standard, since
there are so many standards to choose from -- SQL, SQL-86, SQL-89, SQL-92, and
SQL3, and then I stopped paying attention. There are also a couple of
expansions of the acronym. The original one is given above. The official one
is apparently now a XARA: SQL Query Language. (This
makes SQL a sealed acronym.)

Generic function name for square root in FORTRAN. Standard function name in most common
programming languages.

SQUADS

(Leyland) Stanford (Junior College) QUAntum Device Simulator.

squeezing your own butt in public

I witnessed this in the lobby of the main university library the other day
(2005.10.09), and I thought it noteworthy. She was just doing the left cheek
with her left hand. It was kind of sexy, but ... has liberty given way to
license? Licentiousness? Maybe she was scratching a nonmetaphoric itch. It
reminds me of a comment Edith made once. She complained that Cuban men (in
Cuba) would reach in from time to time and, like, rearrange or scratch their
crotch area, right there while they were talking. She had also done the
socialist solidarity thing for a while and worked in a Cuban factory, so if she
noticed the rearranging thing with her coworkers there, maybe this habit was
more common among the less classy of that classless society. Hmm, I guess
classless can have a couple of meanings. She also reported that her
factory comrades would laugh at her for continuing to work while she talked,
instead of stopping work as they did. This demonstrates that there was
at least something they wouldn't do while talking. It reminds me of
cell phones.
I've also noticed national variations in the propensity of people
to pick their noses in public. Man, this entry is just going down the toilet.

SQUID

Superconducting QUantum Interference Device. Makes use of the fact that
quantum mechanical phase around a closed loop depends on the magnetic
flux enclosed by that loop.

For some information about the optical spectrum of strontium, see the food loaf entry.

SR

Studies in Religion / Sciences religieuses. A scholarly
journal. Don't know a thing about it, but I suspect it's Canadian.

SR

Sum Rule.

.sr

(Domain code for) Suriname. Old Dutch Guyana.

SR

Sustained Response. After the end of medical treatment.

SR

Switched Reluctance. Reluctance is to magnetic circuits what impedance is
to electric circuits.

SR

Synchrotron Radiation.

SR

System Readiness. Rarely as promised.

Sra.

Señora. Title and word for a married or older woman.
Roughly the Spanish equivalent of English
Mrs., except that you can spell it out and it
doesn't look silly like Missus. (English Mrs. really abbreviates
mistress, which for reasons of semantic drift is to be avoided.)

SRA

State Rail Authority. The state is New South Wales, Australia.
Operates long-distance trains and Sydney suburban trains.

SRAM

Scratchpad Random Access Memory (RAM, q.v.).
This was an ill-advised acronym coinage, since SRAM is widely understood in
the following sense:

SRAM

Static Random Access Memory (RAM, q.v.).
Array memory with each cell consisting of a head-to-tail pair of inverters.
[Pron. ``ESS-ram.''] Distinguished from DRAM
(dynamic RAM), which stores data as a capacitor charge and must be periodically
recharged. SRAM could almost be regarded as a two-step bucket brigade.
DRAM was invented afterwards and was originally seen as a denser and cheaper,
but slower alternative. However, the speed trade-off is not so great, and
DRAM has been more popular than SRAM.

SRAS

Syndrome respiratoire aigu
sévère or Sindrome respiratorio
agudo severo. French and Spanish, respectively, for `Severe Acute
Respiratory Syndrome' (SARS, q.v.). You
can learn about it starting at the French- or Spanish-language WHO pages (see
OMS).

SRB

Sex Ratio at Birth. Conventionally the ratio of boy babies to girl babies,
and typically ranging from 1.03 to 1.05. It is common to state this as ``103
to 105 boys per 100 girls.'' Inevitably, people fall into saying things like
``a ratio of 103,'' which might be favorable for the girl looking for a mate.
I haven't decided whether this is not as bad as ``give-away take-away ratio''
in absolute or relative terms.

Sex-selective abortion has caused the ratio to increase in much of East Asia
and South Asia. In the Chinese regions of Hainan and Guangdong, the SBR was
1.30 in 2005.

Historically, the sex ratio as a function of age has declined as children grow
older (i.e., boys exhibit greater mortality than girls), and in the last
century, in the West, the ratio has been a continuously decreasing function of
age right through adulthood. (Until the nineteenth century, death during
childbirth caused women to have a lower life expectancy at birth, and raised
the sex ratio of adults.) In many of the same countries and populations that
have unusually high SBR, female infanticide apparently increases the sex ratio
further. The Chinese census of 2000 determined that the average sex ratio (for
people of all ages) was 1.36 in Hainan. That was the highest regional average;
the lowest was Tibet (1.03), and the national average was 1.17. In some parts
of India, according to its 2001 census, the sex ratio for children aged 6 and
under exceeds 1.25.

There are a number of biological and environmental factors that influence SBR,
and it is not inconceivable (sorry) that these account partially for the high
SBR numbers in Asia. In studies done during the 1950's, the SRB was found to
be correlated with the father's profession.

SRB

Solid (fuel) Rocket Booster.

SRBI

Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas, Inc. A
market and opinion research company founded in 1981 by Mark Schulman, Albert
Ronca, and Michael Bucuvalas. By 2004 there was an additional senior partner:
John M. Boyle.

SRBM

Short-Range Ballistic Missile. Ballistic missiles with a range of less
than 1000 km. May be understood to exclude the very short-range BSRBM.

State Research Center. One example is the IPPE in Obninsk, Russia. This single example is
shared between this entry and an SSC entry. Is
that efficient, or what?

SRCFC

Solid Rock / Climbers For Christ. ``A
community of Christian climbers offering the Good News of Christ.'' Links from
the homepage explain why it is ethically okay to risk your God-given life and
your children's chance to grow up in a traditional two-parent family, just so
you can experience the momentary worldly pleasures of scraped flesh.

Step Recovery Diode. [Pioneered by HP; several makers now.]
When diodes are switched from forward bias to reverse bias, the diode still
conducts for the time it takes to deplete the pn junction. SRD's are
optimized to move the charge rapidly, so reverse conduction stops abruptly.
This sharp change makes a faster switch and is also more efficient
in generating high harmonics.

Society for Radiological Engineering. I see a lot of listings for the
initialism, and indications that it existed at least as recently as 1985, but
since I first checked in April 2009, the entity that bore the name has appeared
to be long since defunct.

SRE

Society of Reliability Engineers. The
lower-case Greek letter lambda seems to be a symbol of importance for
reliability engineers. It appears on the society logo, and their newsletter is
called ``Lambda Notes.''

Shortened Rapid Eye Movement Latency (REML).
Delay of an hour or less in onset of first REM episode, after the beginning
of sleep. May be caused by sleep deprivation and various psychoactive
drugs.

SREML and diminished slow-wave sleep appear to be traits of
depressed patients, whereas increased REM
density appears to be a more reversible characteristic associated with
depressive episodes, according to

SRF resulted from the mating of the Society for Study of Fertility (SSF) with
Reproduction magazine. Evidently they were the same species of
magazine.

SRF

Synskadades
Riksförbund. Preferred English name: `The Swedish
Association of the Visually Impaired.' It ``is the main organisation of the
blind and partially sighted in Sweden. SRF is a social, non-political
organisation where its members actively participate in decision making.''

SRG

German, Schweizerische Radio- und
Fernsehgesellschaft. `Swiss Radio and Television Society.' Founded
in 1931, when the name must have been Schweizerische
Radiogesellschaft, which would better have fit the acronym.

SRG is a private nonprofit that transmits ten radio and three TV channels in
the four official languages of that country. It's funded by license fees
and by advertising. Oh great, the worst of both worlds.

Straight-Run Gasoline. Gasoline obtained simply by distilling crude oil,
without cracking of the less volatile components. Crude from the North Sea
tends to be high in alkanes, yielding a low
octane rating. Cracking increases the
rating by increasing the fraction of alkenes.

Here's the news on March 11, 2006: The Long Wait is over! The campaign for the
2008 US presidential nominations has finally begun in earnest, with the first
straw poll. It was reported that delegates from 26 states attended this
conference of Southern Republicans, which seems to suggest an unsuspected
(susurrate, susurrate) aspect of the Republicans' ``Southern strategy.'' The
conference was held in Memphis, Tennessee, and 1427 of the 2000-odd (or is that
``2000 odd'' or ``over 1500'' as others reported?) delegates cast votes in the
straw poll. Tennessee Senator Bill Frist ``won'' with 36.9% of the first-place
(hence: ``fp'') votes. (This was rounded up to 37% by many news outlets. It
was actually just 526 out of 1427; do yer ain math.) ``Mitt'' Romney (I don't
know his first name), a former governor of Massachusetts, placed second with
14.4% of fp votes. (This was rounded down to ``14%'' by some news outlets, and
rounded further down to 13% by Reuters.)

Everyone seemed eager to stress that the results were not very significant,
especially at this point et cetera et cetera, though it might give the two
``winners'' some public-attention oxygen. (Most citizens don't know the names
of their own senators, you know? So Frist, the Senate majority leader, is not
yet well-known.) Many reports noted that the venue probably helped Frist.
Indeed, 52% of all ballots were cast by Tennessee delegates.

In fact, the straw poll numbers are significant. Frist got 430 fp votes from
his own state's delegates, or about 58%. Tolerable, though not stellar, for a
favorite son. Former Tennessee Senator Albert (``Al'') Gore, son of the late
Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Sr., narrowly lost his home state, and the
election, in the 2000 US presidential election. Among the remaining delegates,
Frist polled about 14% of fp votes.

The two front-runners nationally, Arizona Senator John McCain and former NYC
mayor Rudy Giuliani, used different strategies in the straw poll. Giuliani
declined an invitation to speak and did not appear on the ballot. McCain
showed up but urged delegates to vote for George W. Bush as a write-in. I
really want to make a joke here about ``ineligible'' and ``illegible,'' but it
would be too strained. Bush is prevented by the 22nd amendment from being
elected to a third term. With 10.3% of the vote, Bush tied for third place
with Sen. George Allen of Virginia. McCain placed fifth with 4.6% and former
Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee sixth with 3.8%. The vote share of the other
``potential presidential candidate'' who spoke at the SRLC, Kansas Senator Sam
Brownback, was not reported in anything I saw immediately afterwards, but it
was it was very probably less than 3.7%. That leaves at least 16% of the
fp votes unaccounted-for.

Salem Radio Network. SRN
News describes itself as ``Christian Radio's Definitive Source for News.''
Then what is CBN? Chopped liver? Oops, joke of
wrong creed. Time-out to visit
<CBN.com>. Hmmm. Okay, they seem to
be bigger into video and Internet.

``SRN News is the only Christian-focused news organization with fully-equipped
broadcast facilities at the U.S. House, Senate, and White House manned by
full-time correspondents -- ensuring timely, on-the-spot coverage of breaking
news.'' In principle, the notion of ``Christian-focused'' is problematic. In
practice, I have no problem with it.

Single-Room Occupancy. Refers to hotel-like long-term accommodations for
people who don't usually have any other place to call home. New York City
defines an SRO as a rental unit that lacks its own kitchen and bathroom. I
suppose that's a sufficiently precise definition there, but in Europe it might
include a large share of less-expensive hotel rooms for travelers. In the
1970's there were over 175,000 SRO's in NYC; the number declined to about
50,000 in 1996, and was at about 35,000 in 2009. Typically a depressing small
room lit by a single bare light bulb, with a bed -- correction: surplus army
cot -- and probably some other piece of furniture. The late-fifties version,
sanitized or normalized for TV, provided the setting for a few Twilight Zone episodes about one
or another lonely guy down on his luck.
Essentially an
extreme
economy-class apartment that's not very apart.

With a little sprucing up -- a lampshade, a more comfortable bed, a picture
hanging on the wall, a carpet, a coat of paint, tolerably thick walls, a window
to open to get rid of the rancid acrid stench of eighty-proof vomit -- one of
these could pass for a little room in a London
B&B. Okay, a lot of sprucing up. With
an attached tiny bathroom and earthquake evacuation instructions, it would
resemble a room in a Tokyo ``businessman's hotel.'' It would be the same size,
anyway.

In the typical modern New York City version of an SRO hotel, ventilation and
musical entertainment are provided by the economized construction: the walls
do not reach the ceiling (chicken wire or perf
board or something provides desultory security), so you can hear the chorus
of your stoned snoring neighbors who haven't showered since they were released.
You can sleep through that with a bottle of Ripple in your gut. (I mean the
contents of the bottle of Ripple -- the Ripple itself. "[A] bottle" here
is used as a quantifier, equivalent to 13 or 17 ounces or whatever.)

An SRO hotel is not a toney place to take your date.

SRO

Sleep Research Online. The website seems
to have been ``put down'' for a very long night. The libraries at Georgetown
University
serve this
page describing what SRO was like when it was ``up.'' (In 2003, it was a
peer-reviewed online-only journal published 3-4 times a year.)

SRO

Standing Room Only. Refers to an event with all seated admission sold out.

SROA

Society for Radiation Oncology
Administrators. The homepage used to say ``The Society for Radiation
Oncology Administrators is the authority for radiation oncology operations. It
is committed to providing education, advocacy and information to radiation
oncology administrators.'' The first of their
``four objectives'' is to
``[i]mprove the administration of the business and nonmedical management
aspects of radiation oncology and the practice of radiation oncology as a
cost-effective form of health care delivery.''
I take it, then, that by ``administrators'' they mean not the people who
administer oncology procedures (the practitioners or oncologists) but the
people who administer the people who administer the procedures.

SRP

Salt River Project. Water supply for Phoenix, Ariz. The Salt River is
completely dammed upstream of the city. Where it flows through northern
Tempe and southern Phoenix, it's just dry riverbed
for all but about one or two weeks of the year. In fact, the bridge southbound into Tempe's Mill Avenue is
one-way most of the year. If you go northbound from Mill Av. you drive on a
road across the riverbed, just east (upstream) of the bridge. During the
period when the river flows, northbound traffic takes half the bridge.

At that time of year, the teeming masses float down the river in truck-tire
inner tubes. I paddled; people commented ``New Yorker.'' At a wide, slow
part, naked idiots
dive off a cliff. I mean idiots not wearing clothes.

There's an annual charity event that involves a rubber-duck lottery. To participate, you buy a numbered duck.
You never actually take possession of this duck -- you simply pay for the duck
with a particular number to be ``yours.'' The ducks are dumped almost
unceremoniously into the river by a dump truck, and later that day the first
duck to cross a downstream finish line wins its purchaser some prize.

Rubber and inert masses drift to success. That's the secret of the Salt.

There's a story that during WWII, some German
prisoners escaped from a POW camp with a map and
a plan; they made their to the Salt River thinking they'd make good their
escape by stealing a boat. Nice story anyway.

SRP

Scan Reflectance Profile. Reflectance values as a function of position
along a line across the stripes of a UPC code.
Perfect black is 0% reflectance.

SRP

Signal Recognition Particle. Part of the mechanism in eukaryotes
for dragging ribosomes to the site of cotranslational transport: rough
endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Stops further
translation until destination is reached.

Stirling Radioisotope Power System. An RTG
which uses a free-piston Stirling engine (FPSE).

At IAOP-2001, R. K. Shaltens, L. S. Mason, and
J. G. Schreiber of NASA Glenn reported on their
continuing work on SRPS's (title: Stirling Radioisotope Power System as an
Alternative for NASA's Deep Space Missions).

Student[s'] Rating[s] of Teach{ing|er} Effectiveness. The initialism is
used most at Penn State (their variant of the expansion has no plurals and uses
``teaching''). Possibly PSU's use of the
term dissuades others from using it, since their version is a disaster.

PSU's form consists of two kinds of questions: required, university-wide
questions, and department-selected questions. The required questions used to
be just two, apparently, asking students their overall evaluation of the course
and the instructor. Now (or perhaps this was always, I'm not sure of the
history and the questions are forgettable) there are two other required
questions, asking whether the course is being taken as an elective and what
grade the student expects. The last question is quite useful, since studies
have shown that student evaluations are more highly correlated with the grades
students expect than with anything remotely resembling an objective measure of
instructor effectiveness or course utility. (Of course, if grades were an
objective and absolutely calibrated measure of student learning, student grades
would give some indication of teaching effectiveness.)

So far, perhaps, so good. The remaining questions, up to fifteen of them, are
chosen by each instructional unit (typically a department) from a list of
approved questions. This makes sense, since not all the same questions are
appropriate for art courses as for economics courses, say. Further, each unit
must use the same questions for all its courses. This makes some sense,
since it allows different courses and instructors in a unit to be compared
(well, it makes sense if this sort of comparison is desirable). A problem
arises with departments that offer courses so different that useful questions
regarding some courses are meaningless or worse for others (for the sake of
argument, we're assuming that the evaluations are of some positive utility;
play along now).

I have never taught a lab course since grad school, but for six years my
students had to fill out evaluations that asked them to grade (overall) the lab
component of the course and the lab TA's in
particular. Students faced with this question knew that they were smarter than
the form, but had no way to know how stupid the processing of the form might
be. So they couldn't know what effect leaving the question unanswered might
have. Thus, I normally had at least a couple of students rate the lab and the
lab TA's. This was good, since it probably avoided a zero-divide.

I hope the above example suggests how the requirement to use the same questions
across the full spectrum of courses in an instructional unit is a surmountable
problem. By the same token, it suggests that with a little bit of intelligent
wording, it would be possible to use a single form across the entire
institution. But let's not quibble about the deck chairs, because here comes
the iceberg.

The remaining questions must be selected from a pool of 177.
For example,

Rate the instructor's skill in relating course material
to real life situations.

Rate the instructor's skill in relating cases and other
exercises to practical situations.

Rate the effectiveness of the examples used to clarify
difficult concepts.

Rate the clarity of the examples used.

Rate the adequacy of the amount of examples used to
clarify difficult concepts.

Rate the question-writer's understanding of
grammatical-number concepts. Oops, it's not on there.

Rate the instructor's skill in using examples and
illustrations.

For redundant redundancy, see the entire list.
According to PSU's SRTE
homepage, ``Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence supports the SRTE
program by generating and processing the survey forms and preparing individual
faculty reports.'' Schreyer is a German surname; it's an archaic spelling of
the noun Schreier, meaning `crier' (like ``town crier'' or announcer),
from the verb schreien, `to shriek.'

It's necessary at this point to say something about how SRTE's and variously
named equivalents are used. In principle, one of the main purposes of these
is to provide useful feedback to instructors so that they can improve their and
their courses' effectiveness. In practice, this is not the case. I have never
studied my evaluations and thought -- ``ah yes, this is what I need to work
on.'' My deficiencies and limitations as a teacher are clear enough to me, and
I can articulate them better than my students. More or somewhat
better-designed teaching evaluation instruments would not affect the extent to
which I improve what I might but have not improved. This is pretty much the
universal view.

That is not to say, however, that teaching evaluations are without any utility
and do not affect how courses are taught in subsequent years. Teaching
evaluations serve to quantify students' satisfaction with a course. This
satisfaction is affected by some factors over which an instructor has little or
no control: for example, an instuctor whom students find unpersonable will
always suffer in evaluations, and instructors, like noninstructors, cannot very
well ``improve'' the persona they project. Most factors affecting student
satisfaction, however, might be summarized under the single heading of
``difficulty.'' Students are unhappy if they have to work hard. This is not
an entirely unreasonable basis on which to evaluate a course and instructor. A
poorly organized course, an ignorant instructor, badly selected problem sets,
capricious (but not totally capricious) grading, and most other things that can
make a bad course generally do force the conscientious student to work harder.

If poor teaching methods were all that affected students' effort, and hence
their satisfaction and the course evaluations, then those evaluations might be
genuinely valuable. But this ignores the elephant in the living room, which is
content. Differences in teaching methods account for a small part of
differences in evaluations. Most of the variation arises from the amount of
material covered. In practice, an instructor who receives poor evaluations in
a course improves them by making the course easier, or by letting a less
demanding instructor teach it.

When I get some time, I'll come back and finish this entry. Then I will

Sensu stricto. Latin for `in the
strict sense.' Strictly speaking, this is the same as `strictly speaking,'
which is genau genommen in German. Also
s.str.. Cf.s.l..

SS, ss

Short Stop. Baseball position -- plays between second and third basemen.

SS

Side Switch. That is, a switch on the side of the apparatus.

When volleyball teams switch sides of a court (to cancel the advantage any
asymmetry -- as from sun position, say -- might give), it's called ``switching
sides,'' as far as I know. A side-out is when the team receiving the serve
wins a rally; it is awarded serve for the next play, but no point.

Spread Spectrum (system). A communication system in which the
transmitted signal has a much broader bandwidth than the message encoded.
(The transmitted signal is typically generated by convolution or
multiplication with a spreading signal.)

That name makes one think: sure, when you're underwater you are under
water, but this is almost a surprising way of expressing the idea that you're
in the water. In fact, when you're only ``in the water,'' part of you is
usually not just above but completely out of the water. And usually
when you're under a load of work, the work is all around you! Sooo confusing!

State Scientific Center. One example is the IPPE in Obninsk, Russia. This single example is
shared between this entry and an SRC entry
because I'm too lazy to find some others.

SSC

Superconducting SuperCollider. A name that became obsolete before the
project was completed. (The project was cancelled.) Apparently, the official name is in
three words (the second super is one word).

An expensive particle accelerator elementary particle research in the multi-TeV range. ``Superconducting'' refers to the magnets.
Superconductors are used not to achieve high magnetic fields but to keep power
consumption down to earthly levels. Dipole magnets (most of the magnets) keep
the particles circling as they are accelerated by electric fields; the magnetic
field is ramped to keep the particles in a circle of constant radius as their
energy increases. (Quadrupole magnets in pairs keep the particle beams
focused.) As the particle energy increases beyond the capacity of a small
ring to hold, the particle beam (consisting of bunches of particles) is
cascaded through a sequence of rings of increasing radius. Between the initial
ion source and linear accelerator and collision ring, the SSC was designed and
partially built to use three intermediate rings: low-, medium- and high-energy
boosters (LEB, MEB, HEB) with circumferences of 600 m, 4.0 km, and
10.8 km, respectively. The HEB would have fed a collider ring with a
circumference of 87.1 km. Only the HEB and the colliding ring would have
used superconducting magnets.

In the colliding ring, counter-rotating proton and antiproton beams would move
in slightly off-center circles, colliding nearly head on at two intersection
points 180 degrees apart.

Using counter-rotating beams is trickier than using a single beam colliding
against a stationary target, and because a particle beam is a sparse thing
compared to a solid target, the event rates are much higher with a stationary
target. However, a stationary target is not an option for relativistic reasons.
The relevant energy for interpeting the interparticle dynamics of a collision
is the center-of-mass energy. In the nonrelativistic (NRNR) regime, the kinetic energy K of a particle is
given in terms of rest mass m and velocity v by the formula

1 2
K = - mv .
2

For a collision between two particles of equal rest mass (like a proton and an
antiproton), one stationary (in the ``lab'' frame) and one moving at velocity
v, the center-of-mass moves at velocity
v/2 in the lab frame, and each particle has kinetic energy
K' = K/4. Hence, in the c.m. frame,
the total kinetic energy is 2K' = K/2 -- i.e., half the
total kinetic energy of the system in the lab frame. Relativistically, the
decrease in energy is much more dramatic.

Society for the Study of Curriculum History. ``[T]o encourage scholarly
study of curriculum history and to provide a forum for the presentation and
discussion of research inquiries into curriculum history. The Society was
founded in April of 1977 at Teachers College,
Columbia University. Attendance
at the annual meeting, which is always held on the Sunday before and the first
Monday morning of the AERA conference, is open to
all who are interested.''

Southern Society for Clinical
Investigation. ``On October 5, 1946, representatives from 19 Southern
Medical Schools met in New Orleans to organize the formation of a regional
society of clinical investigators. The new organization, named the Southern
Society for Clinical Research (SSCR), held its first meeting at the Roosevelt
Hotel in New Orleans on January 25, 1947. Fifty selected `Founders' attended,
18 abstracts were presented, and Tinsley Harrison was named the organization's
first president.''

``The rest,'' as ``they'' say, ``is history.'' I don't know about you, but I
find that history can sometimes be a tad tedious.

Society for a Science of Clinical
Psychology. To which I say: yes, it would be a good thing if clinical
psychology were a science. It would even be a good thing if the SSCP were to
shell out a couple of bucks and get its own website, instead of depending on
the transitory kindness of subdirectories under university domains.

Oh great: they bought <sscpweb.org>... but it autoforwards to
<http://sites.google.com/site/sscpwebsite/>.

Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. An independent national
labor union.

SSDI

Social
Security Death Index. ``The Social Security Administration Death Master
File contains information on millions of deceased individuals with United
States social security numbers whose deaths were reported to the Social
Security Administration. Birth years for the individuals listed range from 1875
to last year. Information in these records includes name, birth date, death
date, and last known residence.'' [Link is not to government site.]